Lack of agreement among experts shows why officiating suffers

More on how the culture of officiating is broken

There is still more to say about the bad offensive pass interference call against Wisconsin’s Danny Davis late in the 2020 Rose Bowl against Oregon. We have discussed the particulars of the play in our coverage, so we don’t need to go back over the play itself. However, we do need to say a few more things about why we — as commentators and as fans watching these bad calls — feel both angry and powerless about the breakdown in football officiating.

It shouldn’t be this way. We have more resources, more technology, more of an ability to correct bad calls than ever before. When the NFL made pass interference reviewable, we didn’t think it was going to solve ALL problems and make everyone happy, but we DID think that at the very least, the obvious pass-interference penalties late in a big game — you know, like the missed call which inspired the NFL to make pass interference reviewable in the first place! — would be called. Yet, it is beyond obvious that clear pass interference in the NFL has not been called on a consistent basis this year as a result of the new replay review policy. Non-calls have been overturned very rarely, with tons of evident penalties not being flagged. It has been a joke. Al Riveron is speaking a language no one else can understand.

Why is this happening? I’m not going to provide every answer to this question — not in one article. I will spend this particular piece focusing on only one answer: Experts in a room simply can’t agree on what a penalty is.

The person in the cover photo for this story is former NFL official Terry McAulay, who has worked multiple Super Bowls and therefore rates as an expert on officiating. He did say on Twitter that Danny Davis of Wisconsin did not commit offensive pass interference, so he — unlike Bill LeMonnier of ESPN — disapproved of the call made by the officials late in the Rose Bowl.

Yet, in the Fiesta Bowl, McAulay — who correctly noted that the Clemson fumble and Ohio State touchdown return should have stood, instead of being overturned — did make one clear mistake. He said that Ohio State should not have been flagged for roughing Clemson’s punter. No reasonable analysis can arrive at the conclusion that the Clemson punter was not endangered. Yet, that’s what McAulay arrived at:

I give McAulay credit for acknowledging that the interpretation is highly subjective — I will write about that in the future — but let’s focus on the notion that the Clemson punter was not endangered. A still shot of the hit shows why this is an untenable conclusion to make:

The tweet above is part of a thread detailing the various components of the play. One of the key details to note is that in the picture above, you can see a second (separate) Ohio State defender who completely misses the Clemson punter. That Ohio State rusher was trying to take the ball off the foot of the punter. He took an appropriate line away from the punter’s body. That is how you are supposed to rush a punter.

The offending Ohio State player, however, ran directly into the punter’s body — not to the side of the punter’s body, but straight into the exposed knee and the midsection. It was a direct hit, not a moderate blow from an odd angle. The Clemson punter is jumping forward, not to the side, so it’s not as though the Clemson punter manufactured the contact in much the same way as a defensive player in basketball slides late to try to draw a charge and then flops.

The Ohio State rusher took a bad line. He hit the punter squarely. His helmet hit the punter’s exposed knee. His body crashed into an airborne punter with considerable force. As I noted in the thread, it was a violent collision in which the Ohio State rusher was slightly shaken up.

McAulay argued for a running-into-the-kicker foul, not roughing, because the Ohio State rusher did not drive through the punter. I get the concept that a roughing foul involves overpowering a defenseless punter; that point, in isolation, makes sense. However, the idea that roughing can’t occur UNLESS the rusher drives through the punter is patently ridiculous.

This was a collision. When two bodies collide, it is not automatic that the body of an onward-rushing player will “drive through” the body of the punter. This collision stopped the momentum of the Ohio State player. The crash-bang action stopped both bodies, not just one. That doesn’t mean the punter was less endangered, however. It doesn’t mean the play was less reckless or that the collision was less violent.

Most people thought this was obviously a roughing penalty, but a genuine expert (if you work multiple Super Bowls, you’re obviously a credentialed and recognized authority on football officiating) disagreed. The point isn’t so much that an expert was wrong; the bigger point is that if you put 10 or 12 officiating experts in a room, you’re not going to get unanimous agreement on what SHOULD be obvious calls.

Terry McAulay was correct on the Clemson fumble, and he was correct on Danny Davis of Wisconsin not committing offensive pass interference, but he was wrong on Ohio State roughing the Clemson punter. Officials and officiating experts might get 75 or 80 percent of decisions right, but far too many calls remain sources of debate when they should be unanimously agreed on. If you want to understand why officiating seems broken, and why analysts and fans can’t trust refs right now, the lack of universal agreement on obvious calls is one of the primary manifestations of a big and enduring problem.