Botched fourth-down spot leads to Commanders' controversial Week 10 defeat

The Washington Commanders did not lose to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday because of one play. That can happen in the NFL, but it's often a culmination of factors that decide success or failure.

If Benjamin St-Juste covers Mike Williams on the Steelers' final touchdown. If Jayden Daniels makes a better throw to Noah Brown on Washington’s final third down play. If John Bates doesn’t tackle Larry Ogunjobi on Chris Rodriguez Jr.’s second down run a few minutes earlier. The list goes on and on.

Things might have been different if a slightly better play had been made.

Referees botched the spot on crucial Commanders' 4th-down play

That applies to the officiating as well. I rarely blame a loss on the officials and I will not do it for this game. Washington lost it because they didn’t play well enough at crucial moments. But I do want to point out that the officials made an egregious error on the key fourth-down attempt to Zach Ertz.

Had they gotten it right, Washington would have been in a position to at least try to kick a game-winning field goal.

Washington trailed by one with 88 seconds left. They faced a fourth down from midfield. The line to gain for a first down was the Pittsburgh 41. Daniels completed a pass to Ertz. The veteran tight end had run down just inside the 40, but when he came back toward the signal-caller to make the catch, he was right at the 41.

His momentum carried him back a bit further, somewhere between the 41 and 42, closer to the 41. Ertz tried to lean his body back to get the ball to the all-important 41-yard line just as he was being touched down by Steelers' safety Demontae Kazee.

The line judge spotted the ball on the 42-yard line, short of the line to gain. Thus the ball turned over to the Steelers on downs. But the ball was improperly spotted.

I am not arguing that Ertz got the first down. Quite frankly, even with video replay, that is impossible to tell. It’s entirely possible that he was just short of the 41. But there’s no way he was even close to the 42.

The line judge was positioned at midfield. He drifted a yard or two downfield as the throw was made, and then ran in to spot the ball from behind the play. That’s tough to do, but officials do this every game and they are usually accurate.

But as the judge runs in from the side, he begins on the 41, which is where Ertz ended up. He then moves the ball back a yard to the 42. There is no way he saw that ball on the 42-yard line.

The down judge from the other side seemed to have the play just short of the 41 based on the line he came in on. But he was not the official who spotted the ball.

This is what I believe happened based on rewatching the sequence of events. The line judge sees the Ertz get to a hashmark. The hashmark he would have seen was the 41 because that’s where the former second-round pick was when he made the catch. But as he runs in, that official loses his sense of position on the field and puts the ball on the 42.

Again, the ball may have been short of the 41, but it was nowhere near the 42.

Officials rarely miss a spot by a full yard. The judge probably intended to spot the ball on the 41 but simply got lost as he ran in from the side. Had he placed it correctly, the Commanders would have been awarded a first down by inches. The call would have been reviewed and would have stood as it did during the game. There was not enough evidence to overturn it either way.

The replay did reveal that the ball was incorrectly spotted. Referee Brad Rogers announced that the call would "stand". Had the review shown the ball was correctly spotted on the 42, Rogers would have said the call was “confirmed".

There was no remedy once the ball was officially spotted. What should have happened is that down judge Kent Payne should have had a longer discussion with the line judge to make sure he was putting the ball where he intended. It looks as if umpire Bryan Neale does that after the fact. But whatever was said, it wasn’t enough to recheck.

I don’t know if my interpretation of what happened is correct or not. And I have no way of knowing if Washington could have advanced the ball further against an excellent Steelers' defense to give their new kicker Zane Gonzalez a shot to win the game. If they had, I don’t know if he would have made the pressure kick in the rain.

In another game, the Kansas City Chiefs blocked a short potential game-winning kick by the Denver Broncos a few minutes before that Ertz play. But it would have been nice to see.

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