The first half of Detroit’s 52-21 walloping of Chicago ended with an interesting officiating decision. Lions rookie wide receiver Isaac TeSlaa made a spectacular one-handed catch along the sideline deep in Bears territory with 15 seconds left on the clock. It’s there that the officiating snafu begins.
The official closest to the play immediately signaled that TeSlaa was out of bounds and waved for the clock to stop. However, referee Land Clark overrode that call and kept the clock running. An inordinately long time to set the ball for play by the umpire caused the clock to drain to all zeros.
At that point, the league’s officiating office intervened. The replay ruled that the clock should not have stopped, but also that, because the officials signaled for it to stop, the ball was to be reset at the 4-yard line. As Lions fans know all too well, any officiating reviews in the final two minutes automatically result in a 10-second runoff. That left five seconds, which proved to be plenty of time for Jared Goff to hit Amon-Ra St. Brown for a touchdown.
After the game, the curious officiating came up in the mandatory officiating press conference, which is handled by a rotating pool reporter. In this case, it was Nolan Bianchi from the Detroit News.
Here’s the explanation from NFL Vice President of Instant Replay Mark Butterworth, via the Lions:
“They ruled that it was a completed catch with the receiver out of bounds. The impact of that ruling is the clock stopped because they ruled him out of bounds. If they ruled him in bounds with the catch the clock would continue to run. We stopped the game through replay to confirm the catch, which we were able to do. We confirmed there was contact by the defense after he controlled the ball, and we had his leg in bounds prior to going out of bounds. Therefore, the clock should have continued to run. So, we reset the clock to the down by contact time and then ran 10 seconds.”
A follow-up question covered how the replay came to the decision that TeSlaa was down inbounds.
“We used various angles and were able to confirm he completed the process of the catch. We used two different angles to show that the defender’s right arm did contact the receiver after he controlled the ball.”
Effectively, the replay booth confirmed that the referee made the correct decision to override the official on the sideline nearest the play, but that the process wasn’t done correctly.
Bears fans immediately cried foul and that the half should end, but that’s also not the way the rule works. It’s a confusing process for an officiating miscue, even one such as the honest mistake made here, to penalize the players for things completely out of the players’ control. The Lions once lost a game to the Falcons in that very way, quite infamously. The more teams that get victimized by the weird quirk in the rule book, the more pressure there should be to amend the 10-second runoff.
This article originally appeared on Lions Wire: NFL tries to explain end-of-half replay snafu in Lions-Bears game
