It was a huge primetime game at Lambeau Field, but the referees decided to side with the hometown Green Bay Packers, completely robbing the Detroit Lions.
It was a game that the Detroit Lions certainly played well enough to win. They were on the road against playing the NFC North division rival Green Bay Packers on Monday Night Football with a great chance to make it five wins and a row over Aaron Rodgers’ team.
However, the officials decided that Lions defensive lineman Trey Flowers earned two hands to the face penalties. They were about as phantom as you could have ever imagined. Green Bay would go on to win the highly controversial game at home to improve to 5-1 on the year, while the Lions sink back to .500 at 2-2-1. Were the Lions horrendously robbed of a certain road victory?
On this week’s episode of Stacking the Box, FanSided‘s Matt Verderame and Mark Carman, along with former Lions offensive lineman Geoff Schwartz, attempted to make sense of the nonsensical zebras who made Monday Night Football completely about themselves this week (0:35).
“The problem is in high impactful situations, we have bad officiating,” said Schwartz. “And I want to reiterate that for the most part, officiating, they do a good job. The problem is with these cameras now, these guys in the booth, you hear more about the bad parts of officiating.”
Schwartz would go on to add that maybe a sky judge could help negate bad hands-to-the-face calls like we saw last night. However, he admits that mistakes are going to happen because of the speed of the game, but hopes that egregious mistakes such as we saw last night don’t happen in marquee primetime games such as Monday Night Football between the Lions and the Packers.
Verderame largely agrees with Schwartz in that officials tend to do the best job they can. However, he wants to see the controversial pass interference challenge flag by taken away as soon as possible, citing the officials have no interest overturning such calls and haven’t done so since Week 2 in any capacity.
Overall, the referees certainly made a mess of it in primetime last night. You can’t expect an officiating crew to make the right call every single time the instant in a play happens. That being said, the referees absolutely gift-wrapped that game to Green Bay. In the moments where they needed to shine the most, the officials, unfortunately, came up short and it cost the Lions dearly.
Here are a few other topics discussed on this week’s episode of Stacking the Box:
- Kansas City Chiefs should trade Tyreek Hill for Jalen Ramsey (9:07).
- Is Jason Garrett stealing the Dallas Cowboys offense from Kellen Moore (11:12)?
- Here’s why the Los Angeles Rams are having so many problems this year (15:22).
- Has Kirk Cousins redeemed himself (53:58)?
All this and more!
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