“that was a bad rule correctly officiated”
Actually it was an insane rule that irrationally changed a pump fake into a forward pass. But even treating it like every other rule I don’t think it appplied, as it wasn’t at all clear to me that the ball was lost in the motion of tucking. How long did the Raiders have to wait after the pump fake to strip it? A year?
The Calvin Johnson thing is similar, in that they considered him spiking the ball as he got up to be part of the same motion as catching and landing with the ball. Which is stupid. I would cast this Hail Mary fall the same way, the reed’s inexperience on playing it safe notwithstanding. The reason the Tuck Rule game, the Johnson catch, and this game, among others, will be endlessly replayed is that the vagueries of the rulebook aside to the baked eye it looks like the absolute wrong call.
Granted, people also feel that way about legitimate plays like the Music City Miracle.
Until it’s tucked back in, hence the “tuck rule”. Very bad rule, but the officiated the rule accurately.
Calvin Johnson ran into a similarly bad rule, that one says a falling player has to maintain control “through the fall”, when are you done being “through a fall”, who can say for sure, but because he never really stopped moving you can make a pretty solid case that he was still falling at the point he let go of the ball even though he’d had the ball a while. Lesson there is “play through the whistle”, celebrating before the refs call a play dead almost always has bad results.
This one is different because Jennings had control of the ball first (both hands on the ball when Tate had no hands on the ball) and the rulebook clearly states that if one player has control before second player established joint control then there was no joint control. Those other two the logic of the viewer runs counter to the dictates of the rulebook, last night the logic of the viewer is right in line with the dictates of the book, and both are counter to what the refs called.
Music City Miracle is one of the best optical illusions ever. Because of relative body positions the only time it doesn’t look like a forward pass is that one camera angle where you can see the ball crossing the yard line in the backward pass direction, and even that one you still want to say it’s forward.