Late in the first half Pittsburgh Steelers kicker Chris Boswell drilled a 55-yard field goal to apparently make it a 9-6 game. Instead, as was the norm on Sunday against the Jacksonville Jaguars at Acrisure Stadium, a flag was thrown, negating the made field goal.
The call? An offsides penalty on the right guard Isaac Seumalo on the field goal protection unit. Replays showed not a single player was lined up offsides or even in the neutral zone. After the 5-yard penalty, Chris Boswell missed from 61 yards, sending the two teams into the half.
After the game, which was a 20-10 loss for the Steelers, head coach Mike Tomlin was not thrilled with the penalty at the end of the half.
“I didn’t get a lot of dialogue [from the officials]. I hadn’t seen that called in 17 years of standing on sidelines. Offsides, aligned offsides on a guard, on a field goal protection,” Tomlin said to reporters following the game, according to video via the Steelers’ YouTube page. “And so, it didn’t matter what they said. I just, I have never seen that.”
He’s not alone in never having seen that call.
It was a rather puzzling one that was made, and the replay evidence that showed nobody lined offsides or in the neutral zone makes it even more puzzling.
Former NFL official Mike Pereira tweeted shortly after the call that he believes the crew on the field got the call wrong, stating that officials are only instructed to call “offsides” calls like that based on alignment for short-yardage plays, not field goals.
It’s just another case of officiating being a real mess across the NFL. That end-of-half sequence from the officiating crew for Steelers-Jaguars was rather rough. It included a missed roughing the passer call on Steelers quarterback Kenny Pickett, which led to him being injured, and then was capped off by the offsides call on the field goal alignment. That took points off the board for Pittsburgh in a low-scoring game.
Tomlin typically doesn’t lash out at refs in press conferences, and his words Sunday after the loss to the Jaguars are as strong as you’ll get publicly from him. He’s been doing this a long time, so to not have seen that called in his 17 years as a head coach is rather powerful.
