In Sunday’s Redskins-Cowboys game, Washington quarterback Jason Campbell rolled out and threw a pass along the sidelines that the officials on the field ruled came after he had already stepped out of bounds.
After a Redskins delay of game penalty, the referee reviewed the previous play and overturned it, saying that Campbell had not, in fact, stepped out of bounds before passing.
Now NFL VP of Officiating Mike Pereira says the play never should have been reviewed in the first place. The play ended when Campbell was ruled out of bounds, and nothing that happened afterward could be reviewed.
“We really reviewed and reversed a play that wasn’t even reviewable,” Pereira says in a video at NFL.com.
For the Cowboys, it’s the second consecutive game with the referee wrongly applying the replay rule. The week before the Redskins game, the Cowboys played the Packers, and referee Jeff Triplette failed to penalize the Packers for taking a challenge they weren’t entitled to take.
Cowboys coach Wade Phillips says Pereira talked to him and told him he’s not pleased that his officials don’t know the rules.
“Obviously he’s upset,” Phillips said of Pereira, per the Dallas Morning News. “When it’s holding or pass interference or those things there can be mistakes in there certainly and we see them week to week. But there shouldn’t be any rules that they miss and I think that’s what Mike was upset about. It probably did hurt us some in the Green Bay game and could have in this ballgame.”
As the Cowboys prepare to face the Raiders this afternoon, maybe we just all need to hope there aren’t any replay reviews at all.