One of the more surreal moments of yesterday’s 15-10 Minnesota Vikings’ victory over the Miami Dolphins involved a play that, technically, didn’t even count.
With about five and a half minutes left in the first quarter, a third-down play for the Dolphins had been blown dead because of a neutral zone infraction on Dallas Turner. Before the action could be stopped, Dolphins’ running back Ollie Gordon pushed Vikings’ linebacker Eric Wilson into referee Adrian Hill. Wilson, to his credit, appeared to be trying
to go over and help Hill get up off the ground, but Hill got to his feet and immediately started screaming in Wilson’s face as if he thought Wilson had knocked him down intentionally.
To Wilson’s credit, it appears that he remained calm and walked away without escalating things any further.
It seems pretty obvious to pretty much everyone that Wilson had no intention of knocking Hill over and that he was, in fact, pushed into him by Gordon. Hill, apparently, was not interested in such details and decided he wanted to yell at Wilson instead.
The league was not impressed with Hill’s reaction and has decided to suspend him for a week because of it. The league also suspended a line judge from the Arizona Cardinals/New York Giants game for two games for a confrontation that he got into with Cardinals’ tight end Trey McBride that you’ve probably seen around the internet at some point today.
Everyone knows that making contact with the referees is wrong, but that implies intentional contact with the officials. In this case, Wilson was clearly not intending anything malicious, and Hill’s reaction to what happened was completely out of line. The suspension is completely deserved and, hopefully, Hill will think twice before the next time he decides to get up in the face of a player who had not done anything wrong in the first place.
