King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Admission of error on Polamalu interception nice, but NFL has to fix its nonsensical maze of rules.
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Jan. 17, 2006 | The NFL has to get its act together before it's overwhelmed by minutiae.
This weekend's divisional games provided a clinic on what's wrong with the NFL's instant-replay system -- other than the mind-numbing dead time it adds to every game -- and its tangled web of picayune, often contradictory rules governing what is and is not possession of the spheroid.
Two of the four road teams won, the second time that has happened in three years but only the fourth time in the past quarter century.
The Pittsburgh Steelers came out blitzing (natch) and throwing (!!) and upset the regular season's best team, the Indianapolis Colts, in Indy, winning on the craziest sequence of events to end a playoff game since the Music City Miracle, and maybe since before that.
The Carolina Panthers and Chicago Bears played the bone-jarring game everyone expected, and still managed to score 50 points, Carolina winning 29-21 on the road.
The two-time defending Super Bowl-champion New England Patriots, who never lose in the playoffs, went to Denver to play the Broncos, who never win in the playoffs, and the Broncos won. Convincingly. The Seattle Seahawks lost Shawn Alexander in the first half and still handled Washington.
And all anybody's talking about this week is the boneheaded instant-replay review that turned Troy Polamalu's obvious game-clinching interception against the Colts into an incomplete pass that let the Colts survive long enough to lose on über-accurate Mike Vanderjagt's shanked field-goal try, the third "No way!" play in a two-minute span, following Jerome Bettis' goal-line fumble and Ben Roethlisberger's game-saving, shoestring tackle.
If you're still reading at this point and you're not my mother, you must have seen this by now, but with five and a half minutes to go and the Steelers up 21-10, Polamalu intercepted a Peyton Manning pass at midfield. He tumbled over, got up to run and, while taking his first step, dropped the ball. He fell on it and stayed put.
I would submit that there isn't a football fan in the world who was watching that play who didn't think it was an interception. And I'm including Colts fans.
Colts coach Tony Dungy challenged because he had no choice. He was hoping for a crazy miracle. But at the time of the interception, not one Colts player argued that the play should have been ruled incomplete. The home crowd didn't boo.