Troy Vincent, the NFL executive vice president of football operations, said that the league supports its referees’ judgment on two controversial roughing-the-passer calls from Week 5 during an appearance on ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown.”
“We support those calls,” Vincent said on “Sunday NFL Countdown.” “Why? Because in Article 11 [of the rulebook], this is the one rule, and we have a ton of rules, where the judgment you give the referee, that white hat, is the latitude to call that play in real-time. If that’s what both Carl [Cheffers] and Jerome [Boger] in those two particular games, if that’s what they saw, the rule allows us to say yes to support it.”
The calls in question were a roughing the passer penalty on Falcons pass rusher Grady Jarrett’s sack of Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, and a roughing the passer on Chiefs pass rusher Chris Jones’ would-be strip-sack of Raiders quarterback Derek Carr.
Jarrett was called for the penalty for throwing Brady to the ground “unnecessarily,” which is prohibited by the roughing-the-passer rule, and Jones was penalized for falling on Carr with his entire body weight, also prohibited by the rule.
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Both calls on seemingly innocuous hits caught flak from fans because of the importance of the plays on which they occurred. In Jarrett’s case, he made a sack on a third down late in the fourth quarter of a one-score game, and if not called, the Falcons would have gotten another possession to try and win the game. The Bucs were given an automatic first down and they used their new set of downs to run out the clock.
Jones was called for roughing Carr late in the second quarter and on the play, stripped the football from Carr and recovered it in Raiders territory. Instead of giving the Chiefs an opportunity to score again before halftime, it gave the Raiders a first down in Kansas City territory and resulted in a Vegas field goal.
Neither Jarrett nor Jones were fined for their hits, but Brady was fined just over $11,000 for kicking Jarrett after the play.
