The news coming out of Saturday night’s Lions/Cowboys shit show in Dallas is simultaneously getting even funnier and more infuriating.
Happy New Year!
In what’s essentially a fluff piece by Mike Florio at Pro Football Talk (shocker), the League is going with the notion that the Lions tried to deceive the Cowboys as well as the officials and it backfired, deal with it.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the NFL does not plan to change the procedure for players reporting as eligible. The league views the situation as an effort by the Lions to engage in deception and gamesmanship that backfired.
Pro Football Talk
The NFL is attempting to make it seem like a more complicated situation than it is to protect one of its officials. Unfortunately, individuals such as Florio are falling for this tactic. By using this approach, the NFL is essentially acknowledging that one of their referees is not competent enough to officiate an NFL game.
Florio also tries to pass different situations off that contributed to the confusion, including some reports that Allen wasn’t present during a pregame meeting with Dan Campbell where Allen wouldn’t gotten first-hand information on the play itself. For some reason too, people like Florio continue to try it make it out that Dan Skipper was in the middle of some conversation between Taylor Decker and Brad Allen that added to the ref’s confusion resulting in the penalties that overturned that two-point conversion. This is despite video evidence seemingly showing Skipper being nowhere in the vicinity of Decker and Allen with that same video apparently showing Allen acknowledging what Decker told him. Plus, even if Allen wasn’t in those meetings pregame, shouldn’t it be the job of the other officials to relay this information to Allen? Because again, based on the video, Campbell seems pretty confident that the officiating crew knew exactly what was happening with this particular play.
If this is all on the Lions, why are reports suggesting that the NFL will be demoting this particular officiating crew from playoff games in a couple of weeks? It’s understandable why Commissioner Roger Goodell wouldn’t step in and overturn the result as some are suggesting based on a rule within the rulebook. Doing that sets all sorts of crazy precedents that the NFL probably doesn’t want to open up. However, it’s okay at this point to simply admit that your officials fucked up and apologize to the Lions instead of trying to pass off blame.
