The Pittsburgh Steelers left Los Angeles yesterday victorious against the Rams, winning 24-17, but there was a chance things could have gotten more interesting than what they were in the final minutes of the game. Pittsburgh had the ball with 2:24 left in the fourth quarter on a fourth-and-one call inside Rams’ territory, and the offense dialed up a quarterback sneak for QB Kenny Pickett. They were given a first down on the play by the referee crew, but watching the play below, it appeared that Pickett may have been short.
The Rams were out of timeouts and couldn’t challenge the spot of the ball. Rams HC Sean McVay said after the game that it was their fault that they were in that situation due to plays leading up to that moment, stating that they must live with the call as it was made and shouldn’t have let the game come down to a fourth-and-short with a potentially questionable spot of the football. Former Rams DE Chris Long said something similar on the Rich Eisen Show on Monday, stating that Pittsburgh had a chance to blow things earlier and that Los Angeles wasn’t guaranteed to get a win even if it got the ball back.
“Hey, you can look back at Diontae Johnson,” Long said to Eisen on The Rich Eisen Show, which aired on the show’s YouTube channel. “Diontae Johnson damn near blew the game for the Steelers if I have that right in my head. He had a conversion, and then he comes over and he’s taunting the guy, and then they got to go back again to Allen Robinson. They gotta replay the down, right? So, the chips fell the wrong way for the Rams. I think they got hosed there, but there’s no guarantee that they even win that game. I think that the Steelers were playing tough defense at the time and T.J. [Watt] had a big play to start the second half. That was huge.”
Johnson got called for taunting after former Steelers CB Ahkello Witherspoon got flagged for defensive pass interference, causing the penalties to offset and making Pittsburgh replay the down. Pickett completed a pass to Allen Robinson II for seven yards, setting up fourth-and-one at the Rams’ 39 yard-line.
Johnson’s penalty may not have blown the game for the Steelers but it did set them back, putting them in position to give the ball back to the Rams if it wasn’t for Robinson’s catch and the spot Pittsburgh got on Pickett’s sneak. Even if the Rams got the ball back, Pittsburgh defense was playing well, holding Los Angeles to two punts and a missed FG attempt in its three drives prior.
It’s hard to deny that the spot Pittsburgh received was a bad one, making it feel as if the Steelers were lucky to get out of that game the way they did. Still, the Rams got themselves into that situation where the outcome of the game could have been outside of their control based on how they played down the stretch in the second half compared to Pittsburgh, which has experienced similar heartbreak in the past, most notably with the Jesse James no-catch call. Officiating in the NFL will always have room for some error, just as is the case for the players on the field. That’s the human element that comes with the game. Whether it’s right or not for referees to dictate the outcome of games is another story, but to say that the game was dictated on that one play may be a stretch, as Long referenced.
