Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels used his mobility to buy nearly 13 seconds to set up and throw the pass that became the Hail Mary that lifted Washington over Chicago on Sunday. Aiding him in that effort were two instances of uncalled holding.
Simms and I talked about it on Monday’s PFT Live. Both non-calls boosted the effort by Daniels to serve up a ball that had a chance to be batted and caught.
It doesn’t change the outcome. Plenty of missed calls happen in football. The Rams cemented their win over the Vikings to start Week 8 with an uncalled face mask. There’s no protest to be filed over it, no matter how blatant the missed call might have been.
Still, the officials did indeed fail to call at least two noticeable instances of holding on to the Commanders’ Hail Mary. Whether they didn’t see the holding or they didn’t think it would matter because the Hail Mary is the ultimate camel-through-the-eye-of-the-neeedle play, they didn’t drop a flag.
And, yes, Hail Mary plays routinely entail pushing and shoving that otherwise would be regarded as pass interference. For years, however, the league has deliberately allowed a looser standard in those settings —as evidenced by the difficulty from five years ago in making pass interference calls and non-calls subject to replay review while carving out Hail Mary plays from the frame-by-frame search for contact.
Regardless, when pass interference is blatant on a Hail Mary, it gets called. (Or, as in the case of the Fail Mary, it immediately ends a lockout of the regular game officials.)
The holding that happened before the NFL’s latest successful Hail Mary was fairly blatant. And it wasn’t called. It’s OK for Commanders fans to admit it; they’re not going to take the win away.
The broader point is that, no matter what the NFL does to enhance officiating, there’s still enough incompetence lurking in the execution of the job to make people suspicious that something else might be going on.
Even if it’s not.
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