While Raiders coach Jack Del Rio did not appreciate the referee’s smirk after a first-down measurement, Jason Garrett smiled at Gene Steratore’s use of a prop to confirm his call on a fourth-down sneak by Dak Prescott.
“We hadn’t seen it before. I actually thought it made sense,” the Cowboys coach said Monday.
Officials marked the football right at the first-down line. The measurement was so close that it was hard to tell definitively if it was a first down. The referee examined it for several seconds before placing a folded index card between the marker and the football. In a pool report after the game, Steratore called it “a reaffirmation.”
“I don’t know why he chose to do that,” Garrett said. “It seemed to make sense to me to see if there was space between the ball and the pole, and he determined there was not based on that. That’s all I can say. My guess is as good as yours [why he did it].”
It was, by the way, the first Cowboys’ game Steratore had worked since Dez Bryant’s fourth-down catch against the Packers was overturned by replay in the 2014 playoffs.
