• Saints owner says team was 'unfairly deprived' by missed call in NFC ti

    From Incompetent Roger Goodell@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jan 27 23:21:48 2019
    XPost: alt.sports.football.pro.phila-eagles, alt.sports.football.pro.ne-patriots, alt.sports.football.pro.no-saints
    XPost: alt.sports.football.pro.la-rams

    New Orleans Saints owner Gayle Benson said Monday that her team
    was "unfairly deprived" of the opportunity to reach Super Bowl
    53 after game officials missed a clear pass interference penalty
    on the Los Angeles Rams late in Sunday's NFC Championship game.

    "No team should ever be denied the opportunity to reach the
    title game [or simply win a game] based on the actions, or
    inactions, of those charged with creating a fair and equitable
    playing field," Benson said. "As is clear to all who watched the
    game, it is undeniable that our team and fans were unfairly
    deprived of that opportunity yesterday."

    The Saints had the ball at the Rams 13-yard line with less than
    two minutes to play in a tie game when Los Angeles cornerback
    Nickell Robey-Coleman slammed into New Orleans receiver Tommylee
    Lewis with a helmet-to-helmet hit well before a pass from Drew
    Brees arrived inside the 5.

    el dorado
    @ChildishJ98
    There will be riots if Saints don’t win this, how is this not
    pass interference?

    68
    3:17 PM - Jan 20, 2019
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    A pass interference or unnecessary roughness penalty would have
    given the Saints a first down and enabled to run the clock down
    before kicking a potential game-winning field goal. Instead, the
    Saints were forced to settle for Wil Lutz's 31-yard field goal
    that made it 23-20 with 1:41 left in regulation. The Rams tied
    the game with 19 seconds left on a 48-yard field goal by Greg
    Zuerlein and went on to win 26-23 in overtime after Zuerlein
    nailed a 58-yard field goal.

    After the game, Saints head coach Sean Payton told reporters
    that league officials had admitted to him that the officiating
    crew led by referee Bill Vinovich had missed the call.

    "Not only was it interference, it was helmet-to-helmet," the
    coach said. "I don't know if there was ever a more obvious pass
    interference."

    On Monday, Benson said she had been in touch with the NFL and
    "will aggressively pursue changes in NFL policies to ensure no
    team and fan base is ever put in a similar position again."
    Benson did not elaborate on what those changes might be.
    However, The Washington Post reported Monday that the league
    would consider making pass interference calls reviewable by
    instant replay.

    The NFL introduced the current "challenge" system for instant
    replay at the start of the 1999 season, eight years after an
    earlier, more limited system was scrapped amid concerns about
    its effect on the flow of the game. The current system is not
    used to review so-called "subjective" penalties such as pass
    interference but is used to determine, for example, whether a
    legal number of players are on the field when a ball is snapped
    or whether a quarterback threw the ball past the line of
    scrimmage.

    Benson, who has been the sole owner of the Saints since the
    death of her husband Tom last March, is not the first or most
    prominent NFL figure to advocate for expanded replay. In 2013,
    New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick told ESPN that
    coaches should be allowed to challenge any play they want.

    "I understand that judgment calls are judgment calls, but to say
    that an important play can’t be reviewed, I don’t think that’s
    really in the spirit of trying to get everything right and
    making sure the most important plays are officiated properly,"
    Belichick said at the time. "If it’s offensive holding, if you
    think one of the offensive linemen tackles your guy as he’s
    rushing the quarterback, and the ball hasn’t been thrown, they
    go back and look at it and if it’s that egregious of a violation
    they would make a call. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t. We have to
    live with that anyway but now it’s only on certain plays and
    certain situations.

    "It’s kind of confusing for me as to which plays are, and which
    plays aren’t, challengeable," the five-time Super Bowl champion
    coach added. "I’m sure it’s confusing to the fans to know what
    they all are."

    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    https://www.foxnews.com/sports/saints-owner-says-team-was- unfairly-deprived-by-missed-call-in-nfc-title-game

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