gave the ball to left guard Joe Thuney<\/a>. He was tackled one yard short of the line to gain.<\/p>\nA flag was thrown. It was an illegal forward handoff. By rule, a forward handoff is only permitted to an eligible receiver behind the line of scrimmage.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s gotta be backwards, I mean, it\u2019s simple as that,\u201d Bears coach Ben Johnson told reporters on Friday. \u201cSo, once again, we felt like it looked good over the course of \u2014 we\u2019ve been practicing it now for a while. You know, the initial version, we were actually putting it on the ground. Which, you know, in hindsight might have been the way to go. It\u2019s one of those things. Shooters shoot. We shot. We missed. So, keep it moving.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s strange, to say the least, that Johnson didn\u2019t know it was against the rules for Williams to hand the ball forward to an ineligible receiver. If someone like Dan Quinn had used a play like that, he would have gotten heavily criticized for it.<\/p>\n
Unlike Quinn, Johnson doesn\u2019t have a reputation for making mistakes like that. It was still a mistake \u2014 and it was compounded by the apparent fact that Johnson didn\u2019t alert the officials to the potential for a trick play before the game. Presumably, the officials would have told him, \u201cYou can\u2019t do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the possibility that Johnson is playing 4-D chess. As Big Cat suggested on the latest episode of Pardon My Take, the whole thing may have been a setup for some other trick play that Johnson will unveil at some point later this year.<\/p>\n
Regardless, the forward handoff to Thuney was a clear violation of the rules. Johnson should have known it. Someone on the coaching staff should have known it. As they practiced the play \u201cfor a while,\u201d the potential illegality of a forward handoff to a lineman should have been flagged.<\/p>\n
Again, maybe Johnson knew. And maybe he has another trick play in the cylinder that will now be even more likely to work, given that the Thuney play has been put on film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thursday night\u2019s game between the Patriots and Bears included a trick play from Bears coach Ben Johnson. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-893808","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\/893808","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=893808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}