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
44 people are talking about this
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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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