It’s already been five years. And the underlying problem still hasn’t been fixed.
On January 20, 2019, the Saints hosted the Rams in the NFC Championship. The game was tied at 20, with 1:49 to play. The Saints faced third and 10 on the L.A. 13.
Just before the snap, Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman realized he was way out of position. He sprinted across the formation to get to his man, Saints receiver Tommylee Lewis, who was coming out of the backfield and wide open.
The ball arrived late, so late that Robey-Coleman potentially could have intercepted it. He also arrived early enough to hit Lewis before the ball arrived.
It was obviously pass interference. Obvious, that is, to everyone but the crew of officials responsible for calling and not calling penalties.
The Saints settled for a field goal. The Rams forced overtime. And the Rams won in overtime.
Because it happened only eight months after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for state-by-state legalized wagering, it didn’t create the kind of national outcry something like that now would. (Locally, it resulted in a boycott of the Super Bowl and cratered TV ratings in and around New Orleans.)
The NFL reacted to the gaffe by making pass interference calls and non-calls subject to replay review. The idea was fine; the execution was not. Before the season even started, former V.P. of officiating Al Riveron raised eyebrows during a session with NFL Media employees by suggesting that a non-controversial touchdown in a regular-season game between the Chargers and Chiefs would have been wiped out via automatic review by an offensive pass interference penalty that wasn’t called on the field.
The standard shifted and changed throughout the year. It was a debacle. It was bad enough that the NFL abandoned the expansion to replay review after the 2019 season. And even as the league has slowly embraced the booth umpire/sky judge concept, there is still to this day no official device for fixing a horribly missed non-call of pass interference.
It all could have been avoided if Riveron had known when to ignore the rules. He should have used the real-time communication pipeline to instruct referee Bill Vinovich to drop the flag. Even if it had come out that Riveron violated protocol to get the call right, who would have cared? The call would have been right.
That’s still what the NFL needs to develop. A clear, unequivocal commitment to get it right. A system for efficiently and accurately doing so. The longer it takes to get there, the greater the chance it will happen again.
If/when it does, the outcry will be MUCH louder than it was five years ago today.
