An officiating error gave the Broncos a temporary reprieve.<\/p>\n
The situation, which was poorly explained by both the officials and the broadcast, unfolded when Broncos quarterback Jarrett Stidham, under heavy duress, threw a two-handed backward pass. The ball was recovered by the Patriots and returned by linebacker Elijah Ponder for a 12-yard touchdown.<\/p>\n
The ruling on the field was that Stidham had thrown a forward pass, and that he had committed intentional grounding. Then, referee Alex Kemp said that, \u201cafter discussion,\u201d it had been determined to be a backward pass, recovered by the Patriots.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t a touchdown because the whistle had blown. The whistle had blown because the officials had gotten it wrong in real time, by misjudging the play as a forward pass.<\/p>\n
The far better move in that situation would have been to let the play continue, with replay review available to turn the ruling of a backward pass into a forward pass.<\/p>\n
It ultimately didn\u2019t matter, because the Patriots scored on the ensuing short drive. But it was a mistake, one that wasn\u2019t addressed nearly as clearly as it should have been \u2014 especially since today\u2019s audience includes plenty of people who don\u2019t follow the sport closely enough to understand what happened without a full and complete explanation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An officiating error gave the Broncos a temporary reprieve. The situation, which was poorly explained by both the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-429880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}