Las Vegas Raiders vs Kansas City Chiefs 2022 Week 5: Studs and Duds
Las Vegas Raiders vs Kansas City Chiefs 2022 Week 5: Studs and Duds
Dud – NFL Officiating
After a wild game where both teams score in bunches and we see incredible performances from stars like Davante Adams and Travis Kelce, it is unfortunate that the story of the game is the performance of the officials. Things were going smoothly for the refs until a bad roughing the passer call was made on Chris Jones and then all hell break loose.
By all accounts, it should have been Kansas City ball as he stripped Derek Carr and they would have gotten the ball back on the Raiders’ 46. They likely score and tighten up the game but instead, the refs made a bad call and the game turned for good after that.
After the penalty and the Arrowhead crowd going bonkers, the refs looked scared to make any calls against KC, and 6 straight penalties would follow including a questionable OPI that the Chiefs pull off at least twice a drive.
The most egregious call was a defensive holding on a missed field goal in the fourth quarter that would have given the Raiders a chance to take the lead as the score was still 24-23 in favor of KC. According to Josh Dubow of the AP, this was the first time the penalty was called since 2015, coincidentally against Khalil Mack while he was on the Raiders.
It was such an innocuous play that had no impact on the outcome and instead the Chiefs got an automatic first down and extended their lead with a touchdown. This was the sort of call that decides games in a major way and handed an already dangerous Chiefs a free set of downs.
The last of the officiating decisions that swung the game came on the Raiders’ final drive as the aforementioned Davante Adams catch was, in my opinion, ruled incomplete incorrectly. Adams clearly had two feet down and made a one-handed catch and simply tucked it away while stepping out of bounds. The NFL has made determining what a catch is so complicated that people no longer trust their eyes and think that a ball moving a couple millimeters means that a player did not have control or possession.
To make things even worse, the officials called it a completion initially and overturned it despite it being a razor-thin call when simply saying the play stands as called was the better decision. The Raiders would have had the ball on the KC 37 with 47 seconds to go and plenty of time to set up the game-winning field goal.
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Instead, they fail to convert on fourth down and KC wins the game. The officials literally decided the outcome of the game with a 50-50 call at best despite Adams having possession and the play being called a completion on the field. The referees should never be the deciding factor or the story after a game like this but unfortunately for the Raiders, they made the calls to deny them a much-needed victory in Arrowhead Stadium.