The wrong team was about to win. Seattle Seahawks receiver DK Metcalf, his path cleared by a blatant hold, was on his way to a 48-yard touchdown in overtime during a Week 7 game against the Arizona Cardinals. Two officials stood at close range and, in step with a theme of the 2020 NFL season, did not throw a flag. Instead, umpire Roy Ellison -- trailing the play from a position that rarely makes that call -- rescued the crew by throwing his own.
The Cardinals ultimately won 37-34 on a field goal with 15 seconds remaining in overtime, capping a thrilling prime-time event and encapsulating one of the most impactful trends of the first half of the season. The NFL's directive to throw fewer flags hasn't backfired, even if it has required a veteran save at times. Instead, it has pulled the glare away from an officiating department that absorbed heavy criticism for much of the past decade, all while generating a product that is at least superficially more aesthetic.
The most pertinent thing to say about NFL officiating in 2020 is that, for the most part, nothing has been said. Experts who watch carefully have noted a typical rate of mistakes, and they worry about the long-impact of historically mild enforcement of rules. But those missteps have not ignited into public firestorms so far, largely because they have gone unseen but also in part because fewer flags have helped fuel a historic offensive surge. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has made the simple act of staging a season feel exhausting and miraculous, leaving all other concerns in the periphery.
"I wrestle with what I've seen," said Fox Sports analyst Dean Blandino, a former NFL officiating chief. "To fans, less fouls is good. There are less interruptions. The game can flow. There is a positive to that, and I get that. But I think when you start to look at the game itself, and the balance, and everything else that goes into it, if you go from 15-16 fouls per game to 13, as it is now, over the course of several seasons that will change the way the game looks. It will not be a positive for the overall game."
Indeed, officials have thrown 13.4 flags per game, including those that were either declined or offset, the lowest rate through nine weeks since at least 2001. According to Blandino, the NFL has averaged between 14 and 16 flags per game for most of its modern history. During that period, he said, the league found that 16 represented the sweet spot between adequately enforcing rules and overburdening the viewer.
This spring, however, officials are following a clear directive to call fewer. The offseason additions of retired referee Walt Anderson and longtime coach Perry Fewell to the department's leadership team, however, coincided with the pullback. In a September interview with NFL.com, Anderson said he instructed officials to focus on "clear and obvious" fouls and not "all of a sudden to start calling the ticky-tack stuff."
In reality, said retired referee and current ESPN officiating analyst John Parry, Anderson has led a return to the approach employed by previous generations of NFL officials -- even if the end result went farther than ever before.
"For those of us that have been doing this for a long time," Parry said, "it's interesting that we are trying to remove some of the layers of being too technical and being too over-officious. And we're going back to, or there is somebody in the office, at the helm, that is preaching what we all learned when we started: Never guess, make them jump, don't look for trouble, get the big ones, clear and obvious. These are all axioms that we have heard prior to Walt Anderson. Potentially, the league has gone back to 'less is better.' And fans are embracing it, of course."
And why not? The change has coincided with the league setting a record for most points (50.7 per game), most total touchdowns (778) and fewest punts (929, down 20.5% from the previous 20-year average) through nine weeks of a season.
The most notable individual drop in flags has been a 37% reduction in offensive holding calls over the previous 20-year average. The total of 280 this season is less than half of the 564 that officials called over the same period last season, which included a two-week point of emphasis, a drop that was assuredly part of the near-disaster in Arizona. Parry viewed that episode in a positive light, however, and praised Ellison -- the umpire who threw the flag -- for "working the area that was most important rather than what he was responsible for."
Although Ellison's flag reversed a long touchdown, the manipulation of offensive holding flags has dramatically enhanced offensive output. Through the first nine weeks of the season, offenses absorbed a combined 2,036 fewer penalty yards for holding alone compared to the same period of 2019. The only major penalty to rise in frequency this season has been defensive pass interference, with 187 such calls, the most since at least 2001 and yet another boon to offenses.
"Less flags and less announcements is better for entertainment," Parry said, "but it doesn't mean it's better for equity. Everybody would agree that the scales of justice have favored the offense. More points, less punts, drives extended. Everybody embraced it because it was fun. The purist, maybe not so much. Sometimes the defense has to win. The bad guys need to win to make the story compelling."
The trend can also lead to a competitive advantage for some players. All teams track penalty data and knew, for example, that there were only 16 illegal formation flags thrown in the first five weeks of the season, the lowest such total since at least 2001. And what has happened since? Several knowledgeable observers have noticed offensive tackles lining up further behind the line of scrimmage, a significant boost to their positioning for effective pass blocking.
"Eventually," Blandino said, "what happens is if you don't call the game to the rule book, you allow the less-skilled player to gain an advantage. What's the incentive for them to improve their technique? If anything, it incentivizes lazy techniques."
Enhancing offense wasn't the only motivating force here, and it might not even have been the primary one. Among the league's massive pandemic challenge was readying an officiating staff that had high offseason turnover, missed out on its usual training camp and preseason prep work and has had its normal season rhythms upended in multiple ways. Under the circumstances, focusing on only "clear and obvious" flags was probably a prudent course.
Six officials retired or were let go during the offseason, and five more opted out for 2020 via terms negotiated by the NFL Referees Association. Most crews didn't meet one another in person until the bus ride to their respective Week 1 games. Many officials are driving to games rather than flying, and there have been a handful of confirmed positive cases -- and some false positives -- that have required last-minute schedule changes.
Those circumstances could have led to more gaffes than they've actually encountered. And those that have occurred, including the failure to notice the expiration of the play clock prior to a touchdown in Week 9, went largely unnoticed nationally because it occurred in a game between the Houston Texans (2-6) and Jacksonville Jaguars (1-7).
Officials are also getting a more significant backstop from replay, which has overturned 56.6% of all reviews. If that continues for the rest of the season, it will be one of the highest overturn rates in league history. For context, the rate was 39.8% in 2019, 46.1% in 2018 and 48.6% in 2017.
Ultimately, NFL officiating is like everything else in 2020. The league is patching it together to get through the maze, in this case in a way that has drawn minimal attention. That could change as the playoffs approach. But so far, so good.