Seattle Seahawks

On Thursday night, the Rams and Seahawks staged the best regular-season game of the season, especially given the playoff ramifications.

Prime Video has announced an audience of 15.36 million.

While that’s higher than the season-to-date average of 14.96 million, it feels multiple million viewers lower than the stakes and the in-game excitement should have generated. Two weeks earlier, a Cowboys-Lions Thursday night game attracted 19.39 million viewers in the same window.

The Week 16 game between the top two teams in the NFC had been circled for weeks. The winner seized the inside track to the No. 1 seed in the conference.

And the game itself delivered, in a big way. It went back and forth, with L.A.'s eventual16-point margin in the fourth quarter quickly disappearing, setting the stage for the first two-point conversion in NFL overtime history.

The final number underscores the impact of the teams on the size of an audience. For the franchises with the biggest followings (like the Cowboys), the numbers will generally be larger.

Still, the Rams-Seahawks game should have had a bigger audience. Especially since those who didn’t watch the game missed out on an incredible night of football.

Prime Video has one game left during the regular season: Broncos-Chiefs on Christmas night. And while the Broncos are vying for the top seed in the AFC, the Chiefs have instantly lost much of their luster, with Chris Oladukon now slated to start at quarterback for Kansas City. It will be interesting to see whether the captive audience of a holiday afternoon sticks around for a nightcap that could have the same impact on viewers as NyQuil.

The Seahawks officially will not have one of their key defenders when they play the Panthers on Sunday.

The NFL announced on Monday that linebacker Derick Hall’s one-game suspension has been upheld by Ramon Foster, one of the hearing officers jointly appointed and compensated by the NFL and NFLPA to decide appeals of on-field player discipline.

During Thursday’s eventual victory over the Rams, Hall unnecessarily stepped on the leg of Los Angeles guard Kevin Dotson at the end of a play while Dotson was on the ground. That was a violation of Rule 12, Section 2, Article 8, which prohibits unnecessary roughness and Rule 12, Section 3, Article 1, which applies to unsportsmanlike conduct, including “any act which is contrary to the generally understood principles of sportsmanship.”

Hall, 24, has recorded 29 total tackles with two for loss, 10 QB hits, and a sack in his 13 games with three starts so far this season.

Seattle took over the NFC’s No. 1 seed with the overtime victory over Los Angeles with two games to play.

Former NFL referee Walt Anderson now serves as the league’s primary (and only) spokesperson regarding the application of the rules. Every Sunday morning, he gets very limited real estate in a four-hour NFL Network pregame show to address any/all controversial calls from the week that was.

This week, there were several candidates. The league admitted to the Panthers that a fourth-quarter catch was incorrectly overturned by replay review. Chargers safety Tony Jefferson was ejected for an illegal helmet-to-helmet hit on Sunday against the Chiefs, but Bears defensive end Austin Booker was not ejected for an illegal helmet-to-helmet hit that knocked Packers quarterback Jordan Love out of the game. Why was one player sent to the showers when the other one wasn’t?

Sunday’s Walt Anderson cameo focused exclusively on the most unusual play from the past seven days: The two-point conversion from Thursday night, which tied Seahawks-Rams at 30. During his three-minute segment, Anderson explained the fairly obvious elements that anyone who would be watching NFL Network in the 9:00 a.m. ET hour on a Sunday already knew.

One key point was glossed over. If it was so obvious that Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold had thrown a backward pass that pinballed into the end zone and remained live, why did it take more than 100 seconds to initiate the review?

There’s a story there. An interesting one. One they likely don’t want anyone to know. Who figured out that the play should be formally reviewed during the 100-second interval between the end of the play and the announcement of the review? Was it the replay official? Was it someone from the league office? Did someone from outside the bubble but with access to it flag an issue that otherwise would have gone unnoticed?

The teams were lined up for the kickoff. The game was about to proceed. The play that became a clear and obvious two-point conversion was not sufficiently clear and obvious to trigger an instant decision to review the play.

There’s another important point to make, based on something Anderson didn’t say. Two weeks ago, when he addressed the erroneous intentional grounding call from Broncos-Commanders, Anderson explained that the mistake isn’t currently subject to replay review — and he advocated for a change to the rule. Since then, it has been reported that potential 2026 expansions to the replay process include the question of whether an eligible receiver was outside the numbers when a ball is overthrown in his direction.

On Sunday, Anderson said nothing about a potential change to the backward pass rule. Which tends to confirm the notion that a change won’t be made, even though Rams coach Sean McVay has said he wants one.

Thursday night’s instant classic between the Seahawks and Rams included an unprecedented two-point conversion that replay review changed from an incomplete pass into a backward pass that was recovered in the end zone. The current rules were applied correctly. Eventually.

On Friday, Rams coach Sean McVay argued that the outcome is something that shouldn’t be in the game, adding that he believes there will be an effort to change the rule that fueled the play in the offseason.

Per a source with knowledge of the broader dynamics at play, a change to the backward pass rule is highly unlikely.

McVay’s comments were received by the powers-that-be on Park Avenue as a normal club/coach reaction after a painful loss. Ultimately, the Rams squandered a 16-point lead with 8:18 to play, with the Seahawks’ comeback sparked by a punt return for a touchdown that got special-teams coordinator Chase Blackburn fired.

The two-point play, which was called correctly (even if it took some time), was simply one piece of the collapsing Jenga tower. The Rams still had chances after that to win the game. Indeed, it’s possible the Seahawks would have won the game in regulation with a late field goal if the two-point conversion that tied the game at 30 had failed.

Regardless, the rule that allows a backward pass to be recovered and advanced by someone other than the person who threw the ball most likely won’t be changing. Despite McVay’s role on the Competition Committee, he’ll need to get unanimous support from the rule-suggesting body to make it a formal proposal to owners. And even though the Rams (or any other team) can propose the rule change directly to ownership, at least 24 teams would have to vote for the revision.

Here’s the biggest problem with changing the rule that distinguishes recovering and advancing a fumble from recovering and advancing a backward pass. What would the new rule be?

Would a backward pass be dead at the spot where it hits the ground? Would it be dead if it ends up bouncing past the line of scrimmage? Would a backward pass be permitted to be recovered and advanced only by the person who threw it?

The rule against recovering and advancing a fumble on fourth down, in the final two minutes, or on a try was put in place to prevent a Holy Roller “accidental” fumble when a team is presumed to be in desperation mode. A backward pass is a different thing entirely. Backward passes are always intentional, and a teammate recovering/advancing the ball has always been allowed under all circumstances, without fear of any sort of shenanigans.

Thursday night was a fluke. The backward pass bounced off a defender’s helmet. The ball was nearly intercepted. The Rams didn’t pick it up. The Seahawks did. It’s a very rare situation that isn’t capable of being manipulated at full speed by a team in a “gotta have it” moment, unlike an “accidental” fumble forward.

When changing rules, the league always worries about unintended consequences. Changing the rule that allows a backward pass to be recovered and advanced by any offensive player would undermine an important and potentially exciting device for gaining ground in critical moments of a game.

Especially when the easiest fix is for all defensive players to understand that, in any play from scrimmage, a loose ball should be immediately recovered.

The biggest takeaway from Thursday night’s unprecedented two-point craziness was obvious: If you see a loose ball, pick it up.

49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, whose team now controls its path to the No. 1 seed thanks to Seattle’s unlikely overtime win over the Rams, was asked by reporters on Saturday whether he has talked about it with his team.

“Yeah, we actually did today,” Shanahan said. “I remember when I first got in the league, and I think we scrimmaged New Orleans and there were just obvious incompletions on the ground and defensive guys were running and jumping on it. I remember how much I used to make fun of them for it because I’m like, ‘Don’t they know that’s incomplete?’ But then it was actually Denver versus the Chargers. Jay Cutler fumbled a ball on a pass. They blew a whistle and the Chargers recovered it and the game should have been over, there was like a minute left. Denver was down seven. But, because they blew the whistle, they weren’t allowed to give it to the Chargers. And since that day they realized that, even if you blow the whistle, you get [the ball] if someone recovered it. So, since that day everyone’s been coaching, ‘Hey, if that ball’s on the ground, grab it.’ The two-point conversion was one that seemed a little bit over the top because it didn’t look obvious to anybody that that was the case. But, someone had a habit of grabbing it and it ended up probably helping them win the game. Not probably, it did.”

The someone in this case was Seahawks running back Zach Charbonnet. He has explained that he had no idea the ball was still live, but he has a habit of always picking it up.

The rule comes from a change that was made in the offseason after the 2008 Chargers-Broncos game to which Shanahan referred. Previously, the ruling of an incomplete pass couldn’t result in replay review awarding the ball at the spot of the recovery to either team; the ball was dead where it hit the ground. Since 2009, if the recovery is clear, the play ends where the ball was recovered. Even if the whistle has blown.

Before Thursday night, it was generally known to go get the ball. After Thursday night, it should be something that every coach teaches — and that every player executes.

For as good as the Rams have been this year, their special teams have struggled. Now, with two games left in the regular season, coach Sean McVay is making a change.

The Rams have fired special-teams coordinator Chase Blackburn, according to Adam Schefter of ESPN.com.

Blackburn, 42, played 10 seasons in the NFL, winning a pair of Super Bowls with the Giants. His coaching career began in 2016, with the Panthers. He was hired by the Rams in 2023.

On Thursday night, a 58-yard punt return touchdown by Seahawks receiver Rashid Shaheed in the fourth quarter sparked a 16-point comeback. Shaheed said after the game that the Seahawks had spotted a flaw in L.A.'s punt coverage.

“We’ve been focused on that left return all week,” Shaheed said. “We knew they had kind of a weak point with their special teams.”

On Friday, Rams coach Sean McVay was asked generally to descibe what he saw on the game-changing punt return.

“I saw a flat, low kick that was not at all intended for what we wanted,” McVay said. “You give a guy like that an opportunity, that’s where the momentum flipped.”

In hindsight, that’s where the switch flipped on McVay making a change as it relates to a critical aspect of any football team, especially in close games.

Seahawks running back Zach Charbonnet couldn’t have imagined he was making one of the biggest plays of this NFL season on Thursday night when he casually stepped into the end zone and picked up the football. But he’s glad he did.

Charbonnet scored a crucial two-point conversion in the Seahawks’ comeback win over the Rams when a Sam Darnold pass hit a Ram’s helmet, fell to the ground and rolled into the end zone, only for Charbonnet to pick it up in the end zone. Ruled on the field an incomplete forward pass, it was changed on replay to a backward pass, which means it was a live ball until someone took possession. That someone was Charbonnet.

Afterward, Charbonnet said he didn’t know how the ball ended up in the end zone but he figured it couldn’t hurt to pick it up.

“I had no idea, but I’m always taught to pick up the ball,” Charbonnet said, via the Seattle Times.

Every football player is taught that, from Pop Warner to the pros. But many players fail to do it in the moment. The Seahawks may end up as the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs because Charbonnet did what he was taught to do.

The Seahawks’ stunning comeback against the Rams included two successful two-point conversions in the fourth quarter, and another in overtime.

It was a level of aggressiveness that, as a former NFL head coach pointed out to PFT, is rarely displayed by defensive coaches working under their first contracts. On Thursday night, however, it was a product of necessity.

In all, the Seahawks and offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak needed to have enough two-point plays ready to go. On Friday, Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald was asked how many two-point plays the team has.

“It varies every week, but it also bleeds into your low red [zone], third-down menu as well,” Macdonald told reporters. “Sometimes you do go into the game, tabbed, OK, these are our lead two-point plays, but you’re also going to have options based off what you’re game planning for the third down, low red [zone] area as well. I think that’s what happened yesterday, I don’t think that was a two-point play to start the game. It was kind of an either or part of the base game plan type of thing.”

Regardless, Kubiak dialed it up. And it worked to perfection, after Seahawks tight end Eric Saubert chipped Rams linebacker Jared Verse and trickled into the area in the front of the end zone that had been vacated. (Left tackle Josh Jones also did a great job of keeping Verse from getting to quarterback Sam Darnold before Saubert found the soft spot.)

All three two-point plays worked, including the backward pass that bounced off of Verse’s helmet and was nearly intercepted by Rams safety Kam Curl before running back Zach Charbonnet picked it up.

Consider this: What if the pass to Saubert had been used for the game-tying play, with the backward pass the two-point option in overtime?

The game would have been over. The players and coaches would have entered the field. The fans would have begun to leave. And then, out of the blue, everyone would have learned that the play was being reviewed. Next, it would have been announced that the Seahawks, not the Rams, had won the most important and entertaining game of the season, so far.

When the various components of the nutty Seattle two-point conversion are considered in light of the current rules, everything makes perfect sense. Making the outcome seem nonsensical (even though it wasn’t) had more to do with the delayed resolution of it.

More than one minute and 40 seconds passed from the moment running back Zach Charbonnet picked up the loose ball until referee Brad Allen announced that the play was under review. The teams had aligned for the ensuing kickoff. More than three minutes and 10 seconds elapsed between the end of the play and the commencement of Allen’s announcement that the Seahawks had been awarded two points.

Although long delays for replay review aren’t unprecedented, the combination of the passage of time and the obscurity of the rules that were accurately woven together to change the outcome of the critical two-point try created a general sense that something with the whole thing was off.

That sense flows from deeper issues in the replay-review process, which has created multiple problems this season. (Most recently, the NFL admitted to the Panthers that the replay-review system had botched the reversal of a fourth-quarter catch by receiver Tetairoa McMillan.)

Here’s the problem. More than a decade ago, the NFL decided to centralize the replay process in order to eliminate the inconsistencies arising from having 17 different referees applying the “clear and obvious” standard while conducting the review from the field at every game. The new system was intended to make one person responsible for each review. That person was former NFL senior V.P. of officiating Dean Blandino.

Then, after the approach was changed to put the league office in charge of replay review, Blandino left. As he explained in 2017 on #PFTPM, the league doesn’t value that position the way it should. (Less charitably, they’re too cheap to pay a proper salary for the requisite expertise.)

And so, as we’ve mentioned recently, there’s a current sense of confusion among the various teams as to who’s making the replay decisions. The official rulebook adds to the ambiguity: “All Replay Reviews will be conducted by the Senior Vice President of Officiating or his or her designee.”

Who is/are the designee(s)? Who else is in the room while these important decisions are being made? And who is the Senior Vice President of Officiating? (Check this link, and good luck finding anyone with that title.)

Then there’s the reality that every network has a rules analyst with a direct pipeline to Walt Anderson. Would it be crazy to think, when more than one hundred seconds pass between the end of a play and the commencement of a review, that the decision to take a closer look was initiated by the network’s rules analyst asking a simple question that sparks a flame that otherwise wouldn’t have flickered? (No, it would not be crazy to think that.)

The entire apparatus is cloaked in secrecy. There’s little or no transparency, as to the teams, the media, or the public. Why not have a live feed of the replay center? It would go a long way toward persuading the conspiracy theorists that nothing untoward is happening. (Unless, of course, something untoward — or at least disorganized — is occurring.)

Some have argued for the assignment of three specific replay experts for each of the various broadcast windows, with a camera and microphone sharing the replay discussions with the world. The better approach, in our view, would be to offer Blandino $10 million per year to come back and do the job as it was designed for him to do.

Is that a lot of money? Yes. Is having a clear, coherent, and cohesive replay apparatus worth it? Absolutely.

Think of it this way: At $10 million per year, it would cost each team $312,500 per year. That would be money very well spent, especially since (as one coach put it) the replay-review process is currently in “borderline crisis mode.”

It’s one thing for the various teams to accept the fact that there will be bad calls and other mistakes made. With widespread sports betting (from which the league profits handsomely), many more people than the owners, executives, coaches, and players on the two teams in a given game currently have skin in the game.

And if the NFL doesn’t fix this problem, the overall cost to the perceived integrity of the sport will exceed a pound of flesh.

Immediately after Thursday night’s instant overtime classic between the Rams and Seahawks, Rams coach Sean McVay had questions about the nutty two-point conversion that tied the game at 30 in the fourth quarter. He has since gotten some answers, and he doesn’t seem to like them.

“It’s a technicality issue,” McVay told reporters on Friday. “What they said is, ‘You can’t advance a fumble under two minutes on two-point plays or on fourth downs.’ That’s the thing. Because they said it was a backwards pass, that’s how it was able to be advanced. I think we would all be in agreement, and I have a total appreciation for the layers in the semantics of all the rules, especially being on the Competition Committee. There’s a lot of empathy and difficult spots that some of our officials and everybody’s in, but I do believe that is not something that we want in the game.”

That’s a very strong statement. The rulebook distinguishes fumbles from backward passes. The rule regarding the recovery and potential advance of fumbles on fourth down, with less than two minutes to play, or during a try traces to the Holy Roller. A backward pass has always been handled differently, presumably because there’s no plausible way that someone could “accidentally” engineer a backward pass in a moment of desperation with the goal of getting the ball to where it absolutely needs to be.

“When you’re able to review a two-point play, you split hairs on, alright, is it a forward pass? Is it a backwards pass? When you reject it, they casually pick it up, which you always do that. The whistle is already blown dead, mind you. Then they wait [a minute and fifty seconds] in real time to then go back and say, ‘We’re going to review this.’ Then it ends up getting called a two-point play. By rule, because it was considered a backwards pass and not a fumble, they were able to advance that. I do not believe that anybody would be in disagreement that those are not the plays we want in our game. That was not their intent. They were trying to throw a lateral screen. It got batted down and it was not a successful conversion but by letter of the law, it was. Those will be things that we’ll discuss. I do know this, those aren’t the kind of plays that you want to have people converting on. That’s not something that I can imagine anyone would argue with me on that. I would feel the same way if it benefited us, too.”

McVay’s point reminds us of the observation made in the aftermath of the Steelers-Ravens game. Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin, who also is a member of the Competition Committee, had a chance to question that convoluted catch rule that was arguably (if not actually) misapplied in a way that benefited his team, twice. Tomlin chose not to acknowledge that the Steelers may have gotten a gift.

Whether the league actually looks at changing the rules regarding the recovery and potential advance of a backward pass remains to be seen. The primary rule change that kept the ball alive after it was seemingly dead traces to 2009, when the league decided to allow clear recoveries during the continuing action of a ball that were determined, via replay review, to still be live. (It’s the Chargers-Broncos example from 2008 that was addressed earlier today on PFT Live, and in this post.)

Ultimately, McVay’s concern relates to the difference between a teammate not being able to recover and advance a fumble under certain circumstances while being able to recover and advance a backward pass under all circumstances.

“It’d be like if you fumble the ball on a toss, you can pick it up and advance it,” McVay said. “But when situations and circumstances arise like that, those will be things that I guarantee you will be addressed and conversed over to try to eliminate plays like that for being able to happen while totally acknowledging and being aware that there are a lot of layers to it where it’s not exclusive to those plays because there are other things that you’re saying, ‘Alright, it opens up a can of worms with that.’ That’s something that I have gotten exposure to behind the scenes on the Competition Committee that there’s a lot of empathy for. What I will say at the end of the day is, I can’t imagine anybody thinks that plays like that should be counted as conversions. I know I would feel that way even if I was a beneficiary and the roles were flipped and that benefited us last night. I can honestly say that.”

Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald, whose team benefited from the crazy two-point play, has expressed no such concerns. The real question is whether the rest of the Competition Committee or, more importantly, at least 24 owners, will agree with McVay’s belief that backward passes should be treated like any other fumble on a two-point conversion attempt specifically, and in other situations where a fumble can’t be recovered and advanced by anyone other than the player who lost the ball generally.