The Jets beat the Patriots on Sunday 30-27 in overtime, thanks in part to an unusual penalty call on New England defensive lineman Chris Jones. On a 56-yard field goal attempt, which Jets kicker Nick Folk missed wide left, Jones was flagged 15 yards for "unsportsmanlike conduct" (should have been "unnecessary roughness") for pushing teammate Will Svitek into the Jets' line. Now, it's always been illegal in football for, say, an offensive lineman to try to push a ballcarrier over the goal line. But it seems it's now illegal for a defensive player to push another defensive player into the offensive formation. The penalty nullified the missed field goal, moved the Jets 15 yards closer and four plays later, Folk nailed a 42-yarder to give the Jets the win.
Of course, Patriots fans complained that it was not a proper call, that the rule was not applied correctly, that it's a bad rule, shouldn't have been called for the first time in that situation, etc., with perhaps some justification depending on how it's said. Nobody likes to lose a game because of a penalty, regardless of whether the refs made the right call or how the rest of the game was played. But for years I've had little sympathy for the Patriots, Coach Belichick and their fans in this (or any other) regard, in part because their tremendous run of success since 2001 -- which I am not claiming is unearned or tainted -- started with what I consider to be the single worst officiating call in the history of sports.
The Tuck Rule.
For those who don't remember, it went something like this: The Patriots were playing the Oakland Raiders in a snowstorm at Foxborough in an AFC divisional playoff game on January 19, 2002. Late in the game with Oakland leading 13-10, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady pump-faked and then was hit by Raiders cornerback Charles Woodson. Brady lost the ball and Oakland linebacker Greg Biekert recovered. To everyone watching, including the referees, it was obviously a fumble; Brady was not attempting to throw, had finished his pump-fake and had both hands on the ball when he was hit. I'd been watching pro football for close to 20 years by then, played football in high school, broadcast football games in college, and I didn't see how it could have been anything but a fumble.
But, hold on: The NFL had apparently adopted a new rule in 1999, known as the "tuck rule":
NFL Rule 3, Section 22, Article 2, Note 2. When [an offensive] player is holding the ball to pass it forward, any intentional forward movement of his arm starts a forward pass, even if the player loses possession of the ball as he is attempting to tuck it back toward his body. Also, if the player has tucked the ball into his body and then loses possession, it is a fumble.
Now, it certainly looked to me, both live and on slow-motion replay, like Brady had already "tucked the ball into his body and then [lost] possession" when he was hit by Woodson -- again, he had
both hands on the ball -- but referee Walt Coleman saw it differently. He overturned the call, ruling it an incomplete pass (i.e., that Brady had "[lost] possession of the ball as he [was] attempting to tuck it back toward his body"). Oakland, demoralized, never got to run an offensive play. New England marched down the field, kicked the tying field goal as time expired, won the overtime coin toss, drove down the field again and won the game with another field goal. The Raiders went home, and the Patriots went on to their first of three Super Bowl victories in four years.
Now, I have no love for the Oakland Raiders, and since they had just beaten the Jets in the Wild Card round the week before I didn't really care who won this game. But something always bothered me about the "tuck rule" and the application of it in this particular instance. I'd never seen anything like it before or since, and I have some ideas -- completely baseless, totally fact-free, wildly speculative, crazy ideas -- about what actually went down that snowy night in Foxborough.
Follow me below the fold for my wholly fictitious account of this ridiculous conspiracy theory.
As everyone knows, the NFL hates the Oakland Raiders. The late Al Davis was a thorn in the NFL's side from the moment he, in his brief stint as AFL commissioner in 1966, declared a bidding war on NFL players after the New York Giants signed kicker Pete Gogolak away from the Buffalo Bills, breaking the two leagues' unspoken agreement not to tamper with each other's players. 15 years later Davis successfully sued the NFL to get permission to move his team from Oakland to Los Angeles, giving rise to a wave of franchise relocations and seriously weakening the league's power over its member clubs. Davis and the Raiders were even excluded from the ill-fated USFL's ill-fated antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, as Davis testified against his league and his fellow owners in that case. So, suffice it to say that no one in the NFL office ever roots for Oakland.
Also, Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans was the first Super Bowl to be played after 9/11. Like the first everything after 9/11, there would be extra attention on this one (to the extent any Super Bowl needs, or can bear, any "extra" attention) and it would be infused with patriotic sentiment and imagery. The Super Bowl logo was changed from this to this. The NFL probably wanted at least one of the teams in the game to have some symbolic value, and what better than a team called the "Patriots" to put on sports' biggest stage, for that specific reason?
So, here we have a divisional playoff game between a franchise the NFL deeply despises and a team the NFL really, really wants to have playing in the Super Bowl. The despised team appears to wrap up a victory late in the game by forcing a turnover on what looks like an uncontroversial and not-at-all-unusual play. But the NFL cannot have the despised Raiders advance at the expense of a team called the "Patriots" in this situation.
So someone at the NFL office -- perhaps Commissioner Paul Tagliabue himself -- calls up the officiating booth personally and says, bluntly, "Find a way to give New England the ball back. I don't care how, I don't care why, just find it. Get out the rulebook and find something, anything. Do it. Now."
The booth relays the message to Coleman, who stops the game before the Raiders can run a play. The officials in the booth conduct the video review while one of them searches the rule book and finds the little-known, never-invoked "tuck rule." They confer with the officials on the field and come up with an explanation to match the rule to the video replay. The call is made. And the rest is history.