Should the Detroit Lions have had 1 second to run a final play in their gut-wrenching loss Sunday against the Atlanta Falcons?
A screen grab from the Fox broadcast appears to show Lions wide receiver Golden Tate catching a goal-line pass from Matthew Stafford and being touched down by Falcons cornerback Brian Poole with 11 seconds still on the game clock.
Officials initially ruled that Tate scored a touchdown on the play, but replays showed his knee hit the ground short of the goal line.
Because the clock was stopped in an otherwise running clock situation, and because the Lions were out of timeouts, NFL rules called for a 10-second clock runoff, which ended the game.
An NFL spokesperson said the clock stopped upon the official's signal of a touchdown, with about 8 seconds to play. Alberto Riveron, the league's senior vice president of officiating, did not respond to an email seeking comment on whether the clock was part of the official review.
Lions coach Jim Caldwell tried to move the past the quirky ending at his weekly news conference Monday.
"It is what it is," Caldwell said when asked how much time he thought was on the clock when Tate was touched down. "Eight seconds, it's what we had, what we had to deal with. That's it."
But should there have been more time on the clock?
"I think everybody can split hairs and look at it differently and all that kind of stuff," Caldwell said. "I like to deal with the reality. The reality of it is it doesn't do any good to complain about it, it doesn't do any good to say maybe or perhaps. It's over and done with. We lost the game. They applied the rule as the rule stood correctly. And that's it."
Caldwell said NFL passing plays typically take about 4 seconds to run, and outside running plays generally last about 6 seconds.
He said he did take a stopwatch to the final play Sunday, but a Free Press review of the film showed the play took about 2.1 seconds from the time the ball was snapped until the time Tate was touched down.
The play started with 12.1 seconds on the game clock.
Caldwell said immediately after the game that officials administered the play correctly, and that he doesn't believe the rule needs to be changed.
On Monday, he echoed those comments.
"End of story," Caldwell said. "Growing up, guys always talked about a loser's limp and to me that's the next thing to it, you start complaining about stuff and this should have happened this way. Forget about that. You've got do something about it rather than talk about it. I don't believe in excuses and all of those kinds of things. They don't work. And they're not good for us. We just need to go back to work."
The Lions (2-1) visit the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday in a battle of co-leaders (along with the Green Bay Packers) in the NFC North.
The team has struggled to bounce back from tough endings in the past, losing badly to the Arizona Cardinals, 42-17, after the "batted ball" game against the Seattle Seahawks in 2015, and to an inferior St. Louis Rams team after the "Fail Mary" game against the Green Bay Packers later the same year.
"I don't want to be cynical in that sense, but I can tell you that this a fairly new group and nucleus is the same, every year's different like we always talk about," Caldwell said. "I can only tell you that you have setbacks during the course of games. You have adversity and we've been able to overcome those. So we'll see how we bounce back and the idea is to get it behind us as quickly as we can and a lot of that has to do with just guys making up their mind, it's over and done with.
"But the close ones make you think about it a little bit, we understand that part of it. So that's what we'll do today. We'll look at the film today. We'll go over it, we'll make our corrections, then we'll put it behind us and we'll move on."
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