It is always dangerous thinking to go back through a game and blame a loss on just one play. There are 60 minutes played, and the team that wins, more often than not, outplays the team that loses. There are several individual plays that can be pointed to in the Pittsburgh Steelers’ loss to the Indianapolis Colts, which proves my exact points above. But there is no denying that the highly questionable unnecessary roughness penalty on Minkah Fitzpatrick changed the flow of the game late in the third quarter.
Rookie WR Adonai Mitchell pulled up for a pass he probably wasn’t going to be able to catch, and Fitzpatrick flew in to deliver a hit. Fitzpatrick had no real way of knowing that Mitchell wasn’t going to catch the ball, and even still, he made an effort to change his course to mitigate at least some of the hit. It wasn’t helmet-to-helmet contact, and in real time it all happened so fast that it shouldn’t have been called for unnecessary roughness. Fitzpatrick was simply trying to make a play.
Cameron Heyward had some thoughts on the penalty via his Not Just Football podcast this week.
“Refs makes a mistake. I totally understand that; they cannot be perfect. But for something like that, you would think New York calls in to fix that call,” Heyward said. “They have that ability. They’re able to look at it in real time. You look at Minkah, there’s nothing that suggests this was a helmet to helmet [or] he was a defenseless receiver. You’re gonna have collisions but that are still safe. And so we can’t just say it looked close so we called it. Get ’em right because that changes, that goes from third and 10 to now first and 10 across the 50. So it definitely changes the way the game is being played and you’re giving points from here on out.”
The play was on second down, but it was 2nd and 10 well outside of field goal range at that point. There is obviously no guarantee the Steelers would have forced a stop, especially with the way that third downs went in that game, but they certainly had a high percentage chance of getting off the field. The Steelers lost by three points, and that ended up being a touchdown drive, so it is easy to point to that penalty as one of a few key turning points in that game.
“You would think fantasy owners and your friends and fans don’t want the game to be up to a call like that,” Heyward said. “And I’m not even talking about the game as a whole. I’m talking about that drive just in that outcome.”
It is frustrating for the league to have the ability to overturn calls from its New York office but doesn’t make use of it in a key moment. As is the case with many of these situations, it is frustrating to be a defensive player who feels like there is nothing that could have been done differently. I don’t blame the officials, it did look potentially like a penalty-worthy play in real time, but that is where the replay assistance can come in and make it right.
According to Mike Tomlin, New York didn’t like the call. So what gives?
