Monday night’s controversial roughing-the-passer foul called against Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones included an interesting, and potentially unprecedented, wrinkle.
Jones actually wrested the ball from Raiders quarterback Derek Carr before Jones landed on him. And so the question becomes whether Jones had the ball before he committed the penalty.
It seems similar to a situation in which a defensive player intercepts a pass before a teammate applies an illegal hit to the head or neck area of a defenseless receiver. The defense keeps possession, with the 15 yards applied at the end of the play.
Why shouldn’t the same outcome apply here? Jones grabbed the ball from Carr before landing on him.
Referee Carl Cheffers did not specifically and directly address that issue in the post-game pool report. He explained only that Carr gets the protection after losing the ball, in the same way he’d get protection after throwing the ball.
Per the NFL, it’s not considered a post-possession foul, even if Jones secured possession of the ball before committing the foul. “It’s considered one continuous action,” a league spokesman told PFT.
We’ve found nothing in the rulebook that addresses this, one way or the other. It’s an unusual if not unprecedented outcome, with the defensive player literally taking the ball away from the quarterback before landing on top of him.
Replay review apparently wouldn’t have mattered, since the ruling on the field was a fumble. However, the league office and/or replay assistant presumably could have assisted Cheffers with the administration of the rules. Cheffers said after the game that “New York was not involved in this decision.”
Obviously, New York should be involved in these decisions. They’re too subjective. They’re too impactful. And legalized gambling is too pervasive to give that much power to one person, without any oversight or accountability.
Situations like this serve only to fuel the tinfoil hat crowd, which has gotten louder and louder as legalized betting has become more and more prevalent. It’s one of the themes of Playmakers. The NFL has to do everything it can to shore up the officiating function, because the wrong call at the wrong time will result in various forms of external scrutiny and oversight, now that millions of dollars is permissibly being wagered on the outcomes of these games.
