NFL Winners and Losers of Wild Card Weekend: Romo, Dalton, officials and more

Losers: Officiating for Dallas-Detroit

We can talk about the abysmal non-pass interference call, but let’s start by saying there were plenty of other botched calls in this game.

For a weekend with decidedly few bad moments of officiating, it now looks in retrospect as if they saved all the bad calls for the last game of Wild Card weekend. This was not a top-shelf officiating crew aside from the controversial reversed pass interference call.

A call which seemed to clearly be a case of pass interference, as the defender never got his head turned around and was in contact with tight end Brandon Pettigrew. A call reversed without a long discussion, without anything more than a vague explanation by an official who was, by his own account, (as relayed by Doug Farrar of SI.com) “a hundred miles away” when the play occurred.

A call which seems to be flat out wrong on every level when you actually look at the play.

Listen, Detroit had a lot of chances to win this game. You can’t settle for field goals for three quarters (two, really) against an offense like Dallas’ and think you’re going to win very often. Matt Stafford struggled for huge lengths of the game and with the weapons he had, really shouldn’t have.

So the officiating isn’t wholly to blame. At the same time, this call was a momentum changer and at least in the playoffs, you have to be able to get it right. If that means reviewing it and stopping the game, so be it.

Next: Winners: Carolina Panthers