Last night’s regular-season opener didn’t come down to a one-play, winner-take-all, two-point conversion. If the game hadn’t been played last night, maybe it would have.
After Ravens tight end Isaiah Likely caught a pass at the back of the end zone, the ruling on the field of a touchdown was automatically reviewed. The standard is simple; the ruling on the field stands absent “clear and obvious” evidence to overturn it.
As explained less formally, 50 drunks in a bar must agree that a mistake was made.
Based on the initial replays of the Likely catch, it arguably wasn’t “clear and obvious” that his toe landed out of bounds. It looked like it probably did, but it wasn’t clear and obvious. Only when the last angle came through — with the “NB See It” brand on the screen — was it clear and obvious that the toe hit the white stripe.
That’s one of the realities of playing in a prime-time, standalone game. If this had happened in the No. 5 game on CBS in the 1:00 p.m. ET window, that last, definitive look probably would not have been available. Lesser games have fewer cameras. And thus reduced chances of having the kind of “clear and obvious” evidence to overturn a ruling on the field.
The good news (especially for the Chiefs) is that NBC had an angle that allowed the ruling on the field to properly be overturned. The reality is that not every game enjoys that kind of assistance to the naked eyes of the officials, who are trying to see through flashes and blurs in an effort to get these calls right.
Ideally, every game would have entail a thick blanket of comprehensive camera angles allowing all rulings involving the boundary to be seen with full clarity and specificity. Maybe, eventually, the league will get there.
Last night, the officials got to the right ruling because the game was big enough to merit more cameras than other games would get.