Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh says the official who threw a flag that would have given his team a key first down late in Monday night’s loss to the Cardinals made the right call, and the officials who overruled that flag made the wrong call.
The play in question was a third-and-4 just before the two-minute warning. Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert threw a deep pass to wide receiver Simi Fehoko, and the ball sailed well past Fehoko as he was tied up with Cardinals cornerback Max Melton. One official threw a flag on Melton.
But after the officials conferred, they ruled that there was no foul for pass interference because the ball was uncatchable. It’s debatable whether it would have been uncatchable without Melton’s contact, but Harbaugh says that regardless it should have been a defensive holding penalty, which is not negated even if the pass is uncatchable.
“I saw our receiver get held, wrapped around,” Harbaugh said. “They were doing the uncatchable sign. We had a double-move on, he got grabbed. I’ll let them explain how they officiated that play.”
The official explanation from referee Clete Blakeman after the game was that all of the officials talked and thought the flight path of the ball made it uncatchable. That doesn’t explain why there was no defensive holding call, though.
If the Chargers had been given the defensive holding call, they would have had first-and-10 deep in Cardinals territory with less than two minutes left, and they could have either scored the game-winning touchdown or at least forced the Cardinals to use all their timeouts before kicking a go-ahead field goal. Instead, the Chargers had to kick their field goal right then, and the Cardinals had plenty of time to march down for a game-winning field goal of their own in the Cardinals’ 17-15 win.
That final Cardinals drive was aided by yet another questionable call, on a helmet-to-helmet hit, which gave the Cardinals 15 yards and an automatic first down on what would have been third-and-10. Harbaugh declined to criticize that call. But he clearly wasn’t happy with the officials on Monday night.
