Last week, the NFL’s in-house rules analyst was candid in acknowledging subpar decision making by officials. This week, not.
Appearing (too briefly) on NFL Network’s GameDay Morning, Walt Anderson provided a short explanation of the critical non-call of intentional grounding from Thursday night’s Steelers-Browns game.
In a nutshell, that call most likely determined the outcome of the game. If it had been made, Cleveland would have faced fourth and 15 from the Pittsburgh 38. If Cleveland had failed to convert, it would have been over for the Browns.
Anderson defended the call, in the limited window he had to do so.
“Number 68 for Cleveland, Michael Dunn, he reported as eligible,” Anderson said, as video of the play was displayed. “So he’s an eligible receiver. And so when Jameis Winston dropped back and he goes to throw the ball, there’s really two reasons why it’s not intentional grounding. Number one is because Michael Dunn is in the area. Even though he’s wearing number 68 it’s as if he’s wearing 88. And you can see here that Winston starts his throwing motion and he’s hit by the defender. So by rule that significantly affects this throw. So for those two reasons, it’s not intentional grounding — but it was an illegal touching of the pass.”
Here’s the problem with devoting far too little time to a topic far more important to the integrity of the overall game than 99.9 percent of the other stuff that makes it into the four-hour pregame show. Anderson, given the sliver of real estate he receives, was forced to provide a bare-bones summary that was disconnected from the language of the rule itself.
Maybe they want it that way. Short and sweet and circle the wagons and move on. But it’s not very persuasive.
First, the argument that Dunn was “in the area” means nothing. “In the area” isn’t, you know, in the rule. The rule states that the throw must be made in the direction and land in the vicinity of an eligible receiver. The throw was not made in Dunn’s direction. It arguably landed in his vicinity, but it definitely wasn’t thrown in his direction.
Second, Anderson’s explanation of the impact of linebacker Patrick Queen’s hit on Winston turns the exception to the grounding rule upside down. Anderson argues that, because Queen hit Winston after he started his throwing motion, “by rule that significantly affects his throw.” That’s not the rule. Under the rule, a hit doesn’t automatically affect the throw significantly. The hit, as explained in the rule, must significantly affect the throw. Here, it arguably did not.
The best argument for a non-grounding call was that Winston originally was throwing in the direction of Dunn but the hit significantly affected the throw, causing it not to be thrown in his direction. However, framing it that way makes it more obvious that common sense should have prevailed here, with a flag being dropped.
Winston wasn’t intending to throw the ball to an offensive lineman who was nearly as far behind the line as Winston was. Winston was trying to avoid a loss of yardage once he saw Queen break free untouched. We know it when we see it; Winston rushed to get rid of the ball before he got sacked.
This wasn’t a quarterback lining up a throw and getting hit from behind unsuspectingly and having the ball land in an area where no one was. This was a quarterback having an oh shit moment as he faced a certain sack, so he threw the ball and hoped for the best.
The NFL adopted a flex option for Thursday Night Football in 2023. On Friday, the league activated the break-glass option for the first time ever, bumping Browns-Bengals out for Broncos-Chargers.
While there’s no blanket ability for teams that get a Thursday shoulder tap to say no, the Broncos could have. Per the NFL, the league has a policy against giving a team two short-week road games in the same season. The league asked the Broncos if they’d been willing to make the shift and accept a second short-week road game. The Broncos agreed — even though it makes them the first team since the 1926 L.A. Buccaneers to play twice on the road on Thursday after playing on Sunday, via Josh Dubow of the Associated Press.
“It’s a road game anyway, right?” coach Sean Payton told reporters on Friday, when asked about the shifting of the game. “I like the fact that we have another opportunity. I remember this a long time ago, ‘Boys, we’d rather be flexed in than flexed out.’ It’s a real good team playing real good, and it flexes Cincinnati out who we play the following week. So there was a little. . . . But it is what it is, and they just tell us when we’re playing.”
Payton didn’t go into further detail about the Cincinnati angle. The reality is that the Bengals would have had three extra days to prepare for the Denver game. Now, the Broncos have three extra days. It’s a six-day swing when it comes to relative prep time.
Payton also was asked whether the flex shows that the Broncos have earned the right to play in bigger games.
“Yes, that’s a big game,” Payton said, “but we’ll play in bigger.”
It’s a great attitude. And it’s supported by the performance of rookie quarterback Bo Nix, who through 11 weeks quite possibly could be emerging as the best of the six quarterbacks taken in the first twelve picks — even though he was the last.
Sometimes, transparency doesn’t show up at all. Sometimes, it just takes a little while.
In conjunction with our effort to understand the failure to penalize Browns quarterback Jameis Winston for intentional grounding on Thursday night in Cleveland, we’ve inadvertently finagled an admission from the league that the rule wasn’t properly applied in Week 3, during the Baltimore-Dallas game.
Second quarter. Cowboys have the ball on their own seven, facing third and 10. Quarterback Dak Prescott drops back into the end zone. As he’s about to be sacked for a safety, he throws the ball to offensive lineman Tyler Smith.
The Cowboys weren’t penalized for intentional grounding, even though Smith wasn’t an eligible receiver on the play. The officials called Smith for illegal touching, and the Ravens were told after the fact that the illegal touch essentially nullified intentional grounding.
“They said that it’s not intentional grounding because somebody caught it, even though it’s an illegal receiver that caught it, which is a penalty,” coach John Harbaugh told reporters during the week after the game. “So basically they get rewarded for having a penalty there, you know? That’s kind of probably not what they want by the rule. So we’ll see. Maybe it’s a loophole in the rule. I’m not sure. Something they’ll probably look at. But because a receiver caught it, you can’t call intentional grounding. Even though it’s an illegal receiver and there’s no eligible receiver in the area. Which would constitute grounding. So . . . that’s what he explained to me.”
The issue came up again because, at first blush, that same loophole seemed to save Winston from a grounding call. He threw the ball to an ineligible receiver, who was called for illegal touching.
That’s why we posted this tweet at the time; we thought the ruling from Ravens-Cowboys was being applied again. But then the conversation shifted to the question of whether Winston was hit while he was throwing, whether the hit significantly affected the throw, whether the throw was being made in the direction of an eligible receiver before Winston was hit.
All the league had to say, in order to short-circuit the entire conversation, was that illegal touching supersedes intentional grounding. Like it did in the Ravens-Cowboys game.
So we asked whether that same twist was applied in Steelers-Browns. Said the league: “In the Baltimore-Dallas game, there was not judged to be an eligible receiver in the area. It was an incorrect application of the rule, as caught by an ineligible player or not, that would be intentional grounding if there was no eligible receiver in the area.”
Bottom line? There’s no ineligible-receiver loophole for intentional grounding. Even if there was nine weeks ago in Dallas, that’s not how the grounding rule is supposed to be interpreted.
The NFL has issued its first-ever flex for Thursday Night Football.
The Week 16 matchup between the Browns and Bengals on Thursday, Dec. 19, has been swapped out for Broncos at Chargers, the league announced on Friday.
With the Browns currently 3-8 and the Bengals 4-7, the divisional matchup between 6-5 Denver and 7-3 Los Angeles would seem to have much more significant postseason implications.
NFL owners approved the proposal for flexing Thursday night games in May of 2023, but the league did not use it last year. Friday was the deadline for moving the Thursday night game in Week 16.
The Chargers and Broncos played their first divisional matchup this season in Week 6, with Los Angeles coming away with a 23-16 victory in Denver.
The Browns and Bengals will now play Sunday, Dec. 22 at 1:00 p.m. on Fox. The Bengals won their first matchup 21-14 on the road in Week 7.
The final Cleveland drive on Thursday night received a five-yard boost after Steelers defensive back Beanie Bishop was flagged for defensive delay of game. He shouldn’t have been.
The relevant rule includes a catch-all provision that lists specific types of “other delay of game fouls,” including but not limited to “spiking or throwing the ball in the field of play after a down has ended, except after a score” and “intentional contact with the football to delay the snap or the officials’ ability to make the ball ready for play.”
Bishop knocked the ball out of receiver Jerry Jeudy’s hands after a play. But Bishop seemed to believe there was a chance the play wasn’t over.
Jeudy made a catch and, apparently, wasn’t touched after he hit the ground. He got up, and Bishop punched out the ball.
While Jeudy might have been touched by a Steelers defender, it was close enough for Bishop to knock the ball free, just in case. It was a smart, head’s-up play.
The only problem is that it was more head’s-up than the official, who by all appearances had his head up his butt.
Common sense is all too often ignored by officials who get too caught up in the language of the rules. That tendency can make an official into, as Marv Levy once said, an “over-officious jerk.”
The Steelers tried a Hail Mary on the final play of Thursday night’s 24-19 loss to the Browns, but wide receiver George Pickens wasn’t one of the players vying for the ball in the end zone.
Pickens was otherwise engaged in a wrestling match with with Browns cornerback Greg Newsome at the time. The two players locked up as they moved down the field and went all the way into the wall behind the end zone before being broken up by officials and stadium personnel.
“He was just trying to do WrestleMania with me the whole time. So that’s what happened at the end. . . . Yeah, he’s a fake tough guy,” Newsome said, via Ashley Bastock of Cleveland.com. “He does a lot of that. The antics and stuff. Yeah, he didn’t even go up for the ball.”
Pickens, who is no stranger to physical scraps with opponents, had some unkind words for the Browns after the game as well and Newsome doubled down on calling him a “fake tough guy” on social media, so there should be little chance of tempers cooling all the way down before the two teams do it again in Pittsburgh in Week 14.
Earlier this week, Browns running back Nick Chubb said facing the Steelers for the first time since suffering a severe knee injury against them in 2023 would be “the same, normal game for me” but the postgame reaction on Thursday night made it sound like Chubb was downplaying things quite a bit.
Chubb ran for two touchdowns, including one with a minute left that gave the Browns a 24-19 win over their AFC North rivals, and that made him a popular topic of conversation in the locker room. Quarterback Jameis Winston said he knows “how important this was” for Chubb and defensive end Myles Garrett echoed that sentiment.
“It meant a lot to me,” Garrett said, via the team’s website. “I know it means a lot to him. He won’t say it, but it’s true, I’ll say it. This time last year, we were sick to our stomachs, and it hurt to have his family hurting, having to see that. For him to deal with all that, had to go through that kind of recovery, that mental obstacle. Not knowing what your future is and how long it’s going to take to get back. There was just so much in the air. For him to come back and be pivotal in this game, it just speaks to the kind of resilience and the man that he is, and we absolutely love him.”
Wide receiver Elijah Moore called Chubb “the face” of a franchise that is very happy to have their top rusher back at full health.
Thursday night’s snow-globe game was a gift for sports fans everywhere, cosmic compensation for anyone who suffered through last Friday’s boxing debacle. Everyone who loves football loved that game.
With the exception of two: Jimmy and Dee Haslam.
For them, the epic Steelers-Browns game should kill any and all talk of building a dome in Cleveland.
They’ve made it clear they want a covered stadium in Brook Park. The reason is obvious. Money. Money that can come from having events in the venue without regard to weather.
Given that the NFL has shifted its business model dramatically from in-person sporting event to television spectacle, it’s in the league’s best interests to have places like Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Chicago and Buffalo and Green Bay and Cincinnati and Denver and D.C. and New York and Philadelphia and New England retain open-air football factories.
The Vikings and Lions surrendered their home-field advantages when they went indoors decades ago. They shouldn’t have done it then, and these other teams shouldn’t do it now.
Especially not the Browns. Especially not in Cleveland.
Mark Cuban said it. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. If too many boss hogs decide to put a roof over their troughs, the eating will get better and better and better. Right up until the moment they can eat no more.
It’s too late to undo what’s been done for the Vikings and Lions. There’s time to take a stand as to other potential domes in places where the cold should be embraced. And the current hot spot is Cleveland.
Here’s hoping that fans, governmental officials, media, the league office, and other owners push the Haslams hard to give up their quest to prevent games like last night’s from ever happening again in Northeast Ohio.
Thursday night’s Steelers-Browns game matched up two of the best pass rushers in football, Pittsburgh’s T.J. Watt and Cleveland’s Myles Garrett. After the game Garrett proclaimed himself the best in the NFL.
Garrett recorded three sacks and Watt had none, and Garrett said on the Prime Video postgame show that he believes he showed who’s number one.
“I got a lot of respect for him, a lot of respect for all the guys over there,” Garrett said. “But I’m number one. And that’s what I am, Edge 1, to defensive player of the year. I’m the guy. It’s still me. There’s no other person being defended like I am, or schemed or played against like I am.”
Garrett’s pressure on Russell Wilson played a huge role in the Browns’ 24-19 upset win over the Steelers. Garrett is the NFL’s reigning defensive player of the year, and he’s making a strong case for himself again this year.
The Browns beat the Steelers 24-19 on Thursday night, but Steelers wide receiver George Pickens was not impressed.
Pickens said after the game that the snow and wind in Cleveland prevented the Steelers from playing their best, and that the Browns are not the better team.
“The conditions played a huge, huge part in today’s game. I don’t really think the Cleveland Browns are a good team at all. I think the conditions kind of saved them today,” Pickens said.
The weather certainly affected the game, but both teams had to deal with it, and if the Steelers couldn’t deal with it as well as the Browns could, that’s a reflection on the Steelers.
Does Pickens have a point that the Steelers are 8-3 and the Browns are 3-8, and the Steelers will be favored when they meet again in Pittsburgh in Week 14? Yes. But it was a strange time for Pickens to say it, after losing to the Browns in a game that could make a big difference in the Steelers’ quest to win the AFC North.
