The Kansas City Chiefs left a miraculous Tyreek Hill touchdown on the field on Sunday night.
In one of the most bizarre plays of the 2020 NFL season, Hill caught what would have been the touchdown of the year. The problem was that it wasn’t called a touchdown on the field by officials and Hill didn’t actually know that he caught the ball. The pass was initially popped up, but it landed in Hill’s hands before ever hitting the ground. It all happened in the heat of being tackled to the ground by the defender at full speed. It was an immaculate reception of sorts.
By the time the replay came up on the video board, the team had already punted the ball away. Chiefs head coach Andy Reid and Hill were left shrugging at each other on the sideline. During Reid’s postgame press conference, one of the first things he did was address what happened at that moment.
“Tyreek (Hill) had a couple of touchdowns, I’ll take blame for the one—I’ve never had a receiver that didn’t know he caught the ball,” Reid said. “I mean, he came off and said he didn’t catch it and I probably should’ve hung on to that just a little bit longer to look at the replay. But I’ve been doing this a couple of years, I’ve never had that situation, so it was a new experience for me. I’ll try to do better the next time with it, but what a heck of a job by him. He had two touchdowns taken back away from him.”
Most teams have a coach that is in charge of replay review in the booth and the Chiefs are no different. The view that they needed— the definitive shot in replay didn’t come up until they’d already snapped the ball and punted it away.
“Yeah, they were on it right when they saw it, and that was right when we were punting the ball,” Reid said. “So, I mean, it was a bang-bang thing and we didn’t have time to really look at it before we kicked the ball. So, we kicked it with about 10 seconds left, and normally that’s kind of where you let it go down to right in that area and go with it. I checked with Tyreek, he came off, you can normally tell with a receiver if he had it or not, especially Tyreek, so he was surprised as any of us that he ended up with the football.”
It took 22 years as a head coach for a play like this to happen to Reid. I can’t imagine he’ll be able to call on this lesson moving forward, but it’ll just serve as a reminder to the coaching staff and players to keep their eyes peeled in moments like that. You never know the types of crazy things that the skill players in this offense are capable of.
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