It’s been a rough year for NFL officiating, as penalties are way up in frequency and, as a result, calls are still having a major impact on games. This has been discussed to death; however, I wanted to raise the additional issue of the NFL’s broadcast partners’ complicity.
Yesterday, late in the Packers-Patriots game, when the Packers had victory well in hand, and backup quarterback Tommy DeVito had replaced Drake Maye, the officials made a call that, in the grand scheme of things, didn’t matter.
Patriots right tackle Caleb Lomu completely blew a block on Packers edge rusher Dani Dennis-Sutton, who capitalized by forcing a rushed throw from DeVito. Dennis-Sutton made some light contact with DeVito just after the throw, best described as “maybe a light push” or perhaps “brushing by.” Here, take a look.
Dennis-Sutton was flagged for a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty on this play for the love tap, which is ridiculous, but if you were watching the game, you probably didn’t know how ridiculous it actually was. You see, Fox never showed a replay, which would have almost certainly led to yet another discussion of how the league is protecting quarterbacks to an absurd extent, or worse.
Let’s talk about the “or worse” because while this play did not have an impact on the outcome of the game, it absolutely did have an enormous impact on the outcome of the drive. The result of this play would have been a third and goal from the Green Bay eight-yard line, and a good chance that they Packer defense holds the Patriots to either three or zero points, depending on how aggressive they wanted to be. Instead, the call gifted the Pats a first down at the Packer four-yard line, and on second down, backup running back Corey Kiner punched it in from the four, cutting the Packer lead to 45-27. The Pats would fail on the two-point try after a false start penalty.
Major League Baseball has suffered several pitch-rigging scandals in the last year, where bettors conspired with pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz to throw specific pitches for balls in order to win hundreds of thousands of dollars. With live-action betting now ubiquitous, it is now possible to bet on individual events that don’t matter (much) to the overall outcome of a game, and with it comes extra temptation.
One of the best ways to defend against such things (other than reversing course on the ubiquity of gambling) is to cover your games as transparently as possible, so that at the very least, anything suspicious is out in the open. The NFL, along with its broadcast partners, too often opts for the alternative, where they elect not to show replays of controversial or poor calls if they can avoid it. Sometimes this is impossible, but every football fan has experienced a play where they are screaming at their TV about not getting a replay.
That strategy may have worked in 1996, but here in 2026 all it did was send me and several of my colleagues looking for the clip the following day because we were all wondering what we missed. It turned out what we missed was an extremely bad call that gifted the Patriots an extra three-ish (or six-ish) points. I have no issues assuming that a random poor call is just a mistake; however, once people start trying to hide things from me, they lose the benefit of the doubt. The league has an officiating problem this year. If they’re not going to show it and talk about it, I’m going to assume they are in on it. I am quite sure I am not alone.
