A potentially exciting ending to Saturday’s Texans-Chargers contest evaporated in a flash, thanks to a ticky-tack illegal contact foul that extended Houston’s final drive, keeping L.A. from trying to mount a potential game-winning drive. NFL officiating spokesman Walt Anderson addressed the call on NFL Network’s Sunday morning four-hour pregame show, in his usual two-minute chunk of real estate to talk about officiating decisions from the week that was.
“What a lot of people may not realize is illegal contact is a very unique foul to the National Football League,” Anderson said. “Illegal contact does not exist at any other level of football. And what that foul is, is receivers, once you go five yards, defensive players have got to let them freely run their route. You can chuck them once within five yards, but after five yards, you’ve gotta let them go. And so what happened on this play is when Christian Kirk got past five yards, then, number 29, Tarheeb Still, he slid over into his path. If you slide over into the path of the receiver, you chuck them, you ride them beyond that five yards, that is illegal contact, and that is what was called on the play.”
In isolation, that’s right. And Steve Mariucci followed up with the (frankly) irrelevant question of why the flag wasn’t dropped for illegal contact with a different receiver on the same play. Anderson explained the reason for a foul not being called on Chargers defensive back Donte Jackson (as Kurt Warner initially assumed when discussing the replay during the broadcast) for a collision with Texans receiver Xavier Hutchinson.
Here’s the reality. The officials typically don’t call illegal contact quite so tightly. So the better question is this: “Walt, why isn’t illegal contact called every time it happens?”
Despite the rule that revolutionized passing offenses in 1978 by preventing defensive backs from constantly jamming and hitting and disrupting pass routes before the ball is in the air (with the exception on “one chuck” within five years), some degree of technically illegal contact occurs all the time. It doesn’t get called all the time because, frankly, that would slow the game down to a crawl. (The Legion of Boom, among other successful teams, parlayed that reality into a Super Bowl win 12 years ago.)
That’s the real problem. By “letting them play” more often than not, with illegal contact called only sporadically or when blatant, it stands out (in a bad way) when the rule is strictly enforced — especially when a game is on the line.
This is another one of those “normal incidents of the game” that become tinfoil-hat fodder in a world of widespread legalized sports betting from which the NFL significantly profits.
Obviously, we don’t expect official NFL spokesman Walt Anderson to say that. But that’s the real problem with what happened on Saturday at SoFi Stadium. Illegal contact of the kind that was flagged in crunch time very often isn’t. So why was it called at that specific time?
