One of last week’s two controversial roughing the passer calls benefited Tom Brady, when a bad call late in the fourth quarter gave the Buccaneers a crucial first down. Asked about it today, Brady mostly shrugged it off.
“No one wants any missed calls,” Brady said. “There’s a lot of things I see that are probably pretty challenging to officiate, probably pretty challenging to play defense with, so I don’t have the answers to all those. I don’t think the referees are robots, I don’t think they’re trying to get it wrong, I don’t think they’re always gonna get it right. I feel bad for a guy when they get called something that probably shouldn’t be that way. Sometimes you’ve just got to shake it off. I’ve lost super Bowls because I thought they missed a call. You’re going to get some, you’re going to not get some. You hope they don’t come up but they come up. It’s sports.”
Brady said everyone makes mistakes, including officials.
“It’s just the way sports are. I miss throws, refs miss calls, we try to do the best we can do. When they don’t go your way you just complain to the refs, like I do,” Brady said with a smile.
There’s little doubt that the call for Grady Jarrett’s hit on Brady, as well as the call against Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones on Raiders quarterback Derek Carr, was a bad call. The NFL should do all it can to reduce those bad calls, but Brady seems resigned to the fact that they’ll never be eliminated.
