During the Detroit Lions’ opening possession on Monday night against the Las Vegas Raiders, Jared Goff felt the defensive pressure and decided to spike the ball into the turf between running back Jahmyr Gibbs and tight end Brock Wright.
To many, it appeared to be a textbook case of intentional grounding. However, no flag was thrown on the play. ESPN rules analyst and former NFL official John Parry was firmly of the mind that it should have been called.
“He remains in the pocket and there is no player in the vicinity,” Parry said right after the play.
Normally, what we’d expect to happen is, after the game, the NFL would offer a response to the play and, more likely than not, offer a justification that backs up the non-call.
This time, however, the NFL took the extremely rare step of putting NFL senior V.P. of officiating Walt Anderson live on-air with Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, and Parry to defend it.
Anderson, who joined the broadcast after a Lions field goal and commercial break, did his best to explain why the decision was the correct one, saying that Goff’s pass was close enough to Gibbs that it would count as a legal pass attempt.
“Yeah Joe, thank you, uh, really with the intentional grounding rules allow a lot of flexibility for the quarterback to get rid of the ball, as long as he’s doing so in the direction and vicinity,” Anderson said. “The quarterback — Detroit quarterback — threw the ball right over the head of the receiver, number 26. He probably could have even reached up and touched it. So we feel this was both in the direction and vicinity and was properly not called a foul.”
“And we’ll leave it at that,” added Joe Buck, despite the fact that Anderson had just contradicted their own rules analyst.
As PFT’s Mike Florio pointed out, Anderson’s explanation remains in some grey area compared to the actual rule, which states “It is a foul for intentional grounding if a passer, facing an imminent loss of yardage because of pressure from the defense, throws a forward pass without a realistic chance of completion. A realistic chance of completion is defined as a pass that is thrown in the direction of and lands in the vicinity of an originally eligible offensive receiver.”
Florio reached out to the NFL to see if appearances like this one from Anderson are going to become the norm when a network’s rules analyst disagrees with the call on the field.
“The league says that it has officiating personnel on call to answer questions from broadcast partners in real-time,” wrote Florio. “The league typically asks the network rules analysts to share the NFL’s perspective regarding officiating decisions.”
That doesn’t really answer the question and really only creates more of them. How often will Anderson make appearances on NFL broadcasts? Will the NFL now respond to every disagreement from a rules analyst in real time? What would make them decide not to do that next time?
WBZ News’ Michael Hurley pointed out that a similar situation happened on Sunday Night Football when Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert threw away a pass that appeared like it could have been called for intentional grounding. It wasn’t, but NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay adamantly argued it should have been called as such.
“That’s clearly intentional grounding,” McAulay stated. “He’s not — Ekeler’s not in the vicinity of that pass. This is absolutely intentional grounding.”
Anderson did not appear on NBC afterward to challenge McAulay’s notion of correctness on the call. Was Monday’s appearance a reaction to Sunday’s absence of one? And if so, what happens on the next questionable intentional grounding call?
We don’t really know where the NFL goes from here. First and foremost, it probably needs to decide if Anderson is the best person to send out there when the NFL needs to make its point and defend its officials. He didn’t exactly seem camera-ready on Monday for his big moment and his explanation left plenty to be desired. He might have confirmed that the NFL was good with the call but he didn’t sell its correctness to America. This is all also assuming that the league wants to continue challenging its own broadcasting partners regularly, which it may not.
Perhaps the biggest question of all is, what happens when the referee gets something very clearly wrong and the rules analyst is very clearly correct? Would Anderson or something else show up on live television to admit in-game that they screwed up? Almost certainly not. But there is precedent now for an appearance all the same. Something tells us the NFL will regret having opened this Pandora’s box.