The game-changing ruling in the Bills-Broncos playoff game got short shrift at the time. It has since become the most dominant topic of discussion in the entire sport.

The folks at NFL Network, which is owned and operated by the league, repeatedly made that point during Sunday morning’s show. The critical decision that Buffalo receiver Brandin Cooks failed to complete the process of catching the ball and Denver cornerback Ja’Quan McMillian intercepted it happened too quickly, with no explanation from referee Carl Cheffers as to the ruling on the field and/or any review of it.

During his weekly appearance on the NFL Network Sunday pregame show, NFL officiating spokesman Walt Anderson went through the reasoning that resulted in the play being not a catch but an interception. The ball, as Anderson explained it, immediately came loose when Cooks hit the ground and ended up in the control of McMillian.

Anderson said that both the replay assistant in the stadium “and New York” reviewed the ruling on the field of an interception.

Steve Mariucci pressed Anderson on one key point: “Who made the call?”

Anderson said that, in the league office, there’s an entire staff of instant-replay officials, with “multiple people at the same time reviewing every play.” Anderson pointed to the “millions of dollars” the NFL has invested in the Hawk-Eye camera system, so that they can look at all angles, talk to each other, and confirm the call on the field.

To his credit, Mariucci kept pushing Anderson. Why, Mariucci asked, didn’t referee Carl Cheffers explain the situation to the millions who were watching the game?

Anderson said that, even without a full-blown replay review, every play is being reviewed by multiple people. “If you can confirm the ruling on the field was correct, they want to move the game along,” Anderson said.

Anderson then added that CBS did a good job of explaining the situation to the audience. Mariucci quipped that he doesn’t want to hear about it from Tony Romo.

“I think Carl should have done that,” Mariucci said.

And then Colleen Wolfe said “more transparency would be good.” She’s absolutely right.

We’ve been saying for years that there should be public access to the replay-review process, whether during a quick look or a full-blown review. We need to see what they’re seeing, and to hear what they’re saying The current process, as Kyle Brandt said earlier in the show, feels “Orwellian.”

That was the risk of exporting replay review from the stadium (where the referee made the replay decisions) to the league office. At the time, we were led to believe Dean Blandino would be making all replay-reviews decisions. And maybe he would have been, if he hadn’t left for Fox because, as Blandino later said, the NFL doesn’t properly “value the position.”

Now, there’s apparently no one person whose name is on these decisions. Combining that with zero transparency creates natural curiosity regarding how and why such an important decision was made — and why it all seemed to be so rushed.

It’s one thing to move along a regular-season game that started in the cluster of 1:00 p.m. ET kickoffs. It’s quite another to slip the engine into overdrive when so much is riding on the outcome.

That’s separate from whether the call was right (there was no effort to reconcile the decision with the Week 14 Steelers-Ravens play that started as an interception and ended via replay review as a catch by Aaron Rodgers). Instead of having Gene Steratore interpret the video evidence for CBS, we should have heard about it from the people who were making the decision, while they were making it.

For starters, it would help tremendously to know who exactly is making these decisions. We still don’t.

From the official rulebook: “All Replay Reviews will be conducted by the Senior Vice President of Officiating or his or her designee.” As explained last month in the aftermath of the crazy backwards-pass, two-point replay ruling in Rams-Seahawks, we don’t even know who the current Senior V.P. of Officiating is.

And we definitely don’t know who his or her specific designee was for one of the most important rulings of the entire 2025 season. At a bare minimum, we should.