The Titans were awarded a touchdown on an Andrew Luck interception on Sunday, on a play that should have been blown dead before Luck threw the ball. And even though a replay conclusively showed that Luck’s knee was down before he let go of the ball, the Titans’ touchdown wasn’t overturned.
NFL director of instant replay Dean Blandino says that can’t happen again.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t get this angle down to the referee,” Blandino said on NFL Network. “The replay official did not send it down to the referee. And that is a mistake, and that’s something that we have to make sure doesn’t happen again. You can see that the knee is down, you can see that Luck clearly has control of the football, but the referee never got a look at this angle because the replay official didn’t send it down to the field, and that’s something that we’re going to work on and we have been working on to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The Colts overcame the replay assistant’s mistake and won the game anyway, but mistakes like that are inexcusable, and the NFL needs to make sure that something like that doesn’t happen again. At the start of this season, botched calls by the replacement officials were the biggest story in the NFL. No one wants botched calls to be the NFL’s biggest story at the end of the season.