One of the oddest moments of Week Three came on a punt early in the first quarter of the Cardinals’ 31-19 win over the Jaguars in Jacksonville.
A penalty flag thrown by the field judge hit a punt headed toward Cardinals returner Rondale Moore and changed the trajectory of the ball enough that Moore muffed the catch. He was able to recover the ball and the Cardinals won the game, which Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury said led to a very different reaction than if the Jaguars had recovered.
Kingsbury said on Monday that “it seems quite unfair that we would lose the ball” under those circumstances and that the official “should probably be ejected at that point,” although he also said that neither he nor Moore knew what happened in the moment.
“He’s hard on himself and I don’t know if he even knew what had happened,” Kingsbury said, via Josh Weinfuss of ESPN.com. “But, it looked kind of like a Twilight Zone. Like, he had it and then all of a sudden he didn’t have it. And, so, I didn’t know that had occurred, but you would think that maybe we can adjust that rule.”
Kingsbury said he doesn’t think discussion of such a rule change is likely to come up given that there’s no other known examples of this happening, but the Cardinals could submit a proposal this offseason to see if there’s any appetite for such a conversation.