With the NFL and the NFLRA agreeing to a new collective bargaining agreement on Wednesday, the great fallout from the debacle in Seattle on Monday night will be the end of the lockout.
That won’t make the Packers feel any better about the result of the game, but there was the hope that the final play of the game could turn out to be a teachable moment for safety M.D. Jennings and the rest of the Green Bay defensive backs. Many have pointed out that if Jennings had knocked the ball down instead of trying to catch it, the replacement officials would never have been given the chance to make their fateful ruling.
Such suggestions don’t do much for Jennings, though. Rob Demovsky of the Green Bay Press-Gazette reports that the events of Monday night have left Jennings an unchanged man.
“It’s tough to learn something from that situation,” Jennings said. “You can second-guess yourself, thinking catch it or bat it down. But I just had to go with my instincts, and that was to go up and try to make a play on the ball.”
The key for Jennings and any other defensive backs is to have their instincts tell them to knock the ball down instead of intercepting it on a Hail Mary. That’s easier said than done for players who spend every other play of every game thinking about making an interception, of course, but they got a pretty valuable lesson in the benefits of that approach on Monday night.