As the NFL makes more and more officiating misses subject to replay review, the lingering blind spots become more and more glaring.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s time (in fact, it\u2019s long overdue) for missed facemask fouls to be called via replay.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no reason not to do it. Replay currently can be used to undo an erroneous facemask call. Why shouldn\u2019t it be used when a clear and obvious foul was missed?<\/p>\n
It happened during the second quarter of Sunday\u2019s NFC Championship, when Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford had his facemask grabbed on a third-down sack that forced a field goal. If the penalty hadn\u2019t been missed, the Rams would have gotten 15 yards and a fresh set of downs.<\/p>\n
Some would say the NFL resists using replay to put a flag on the field. From its inception, however, the current replay rules have allowed a penalty to be called for having too many men on the field.<\/p>\n
Today, too many things are reviewable to justify omitting something that requires no subjectivity. And it\u2019s eventually going to affect a huge game, in a huge spot.<\/p>\n
It affected today\u2019s huge NFC Championship, ending a potential touchdown drive that could have tied the game at 10 and forcing the Rams to settle for three. And it\u2019s a flaw that can easily be fixed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the NFL makes more and more officiating misses subject to replay review, the lingering blind spots become…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-430057","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\/430057","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=430057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}