IMO, Campbell thought he could point back to pregame, and in the confusion the ref would give them the call. And if not, kick the XP except his stubbornness got the better of him. Schefter said the other nite another teams executive told him that’s exactly what he was trying to do, confuse the refs in the hope he’d say it was his error and give them the conversion.
Had they got it right with 68 being eligible, the formation was fine. But being that they called 70 as reporting, both sides of the formation was illegal.
I actually think if they gave the conversion to Detroit after not announcing it properly , that would have been a much bigger problem for the league. My guess is that it’s like that phantom tripping call. Not reviewable.
I agree. The League has an officiating problem, in perception if not actual.
That might be true if the refs didn't tell the Cowboys and announce that 70 was eligible.
Did we catch a break on the tripping penalty. I am not sure how you can say we caught a break when the Officiating crew announced 70 as the eligible player. Refs made a correctable mistake that could have been corrected by the Lions pre-snap but we did not "catch a break". They heard the 70 being called eligible but chose to see if they could get away with it.
I still don’t understand how we caught a break. If the ref announces 68 eligible, the defense is now focused on him and the only 2 other guys eligible. That reception has Almost zero chance of occurring if the defense is told the correct player.
This 100% you dont just run the play and throw to a guy YOU KNOW has not been deemed elegible by the refs..
I still fail to see how it’s a break when the only reason the play worked was because of the issue in question. It’s not as if it was a bad call that bailed out a play that was going to be successful regardless, like a holding call on a receiver on the opposite side of the field. The Lions only converted because Dallas had no reason to believe Decker was eligible and didn’t cover him. Had the correct number been announced, Dallas would have and the play fails.
Except they didn’t. Whatever happened before, the Cowboys were told that 70 was eligible and they played the try accordingly. We have no idea how the try would have gone if they had been told 68 was eligible, but we know for sure that Dallas would have played it differently.
I believe it was #70 as he set up on the inside of 68 and would have been in the tackle position. I think
Thought about that too. Hard to tell. Very physical team, so it was going all over the place. They weren't a Seattle and burning us non-stop. They also weren't a Buffalo and we couldn't stop the run at all. I think I was most worried that their defense was another team once again giving our O-Line some fits, and we couldn't run to save our lives.
70 is inside of 58 on the right. It’s an unbalanced formation
Actually I think we do and that's what Dan Campbell was worried about we were finding our stride on offense if we didn't get screwed on the tripping call we would have ran the clock down too far for them to even have an opportunity at that drive so we were already screwed on the ghost tripping call that should have went against them not us so it wasn't just a bad call on us it was a call in the wrong team that stopped the clock gave them a free time out put us back behind the change and forced us to throw the football+
I'm glad the refs did their jobs. Never thought I'd say that.
Of course we caught a break. We caught a break when Goff missed the throw to a wide open TE on the last play. We caught a break when Campbell decided to go for two 3 times instead of tying the game.
We didn't give them the tripping call. The refs just got it wrong.
I agree, except for one thing. When an ineligible player reports as eligible, the ref informs the defense of it. If the refs informed the Cowboys #70 reported as eligible rather than #68, then the Cowboys defended that play based on false info. Accordingly, if the proper info had been conveyed to the Cowboys that play may have gone differently
