On Sunday in Detroit, an apparent Jared Goff fumble that was picked up and returned for a Saints touchdown was overturned on replay. Lions head coach Dan Campbell was pleasantly surprised.
Campbell admitted after the game that while watching the play, he thought Goff fumbled. He didn’t realize until the officials explained it to him that Goff starting his throwing motion made it an incomplete pass, even though the ball traveled backward after it was knocked out of Goff’s hand.
“I’ll take that one. I’ll be the first to say, I thought we lost that one. The arm was going forward, it had a forward motion, that was how they saw it. We got one. We’ll take that,” Campbell said.
The replay ruling was correct, but counterintuitive: It would seem that when a quarterback throws the ball backward, that makes it a backward pass. Under NFL rules, however, if the quarterback has started a forward throwing motion, it’s a forward pass even if a defender hits the quarterback mid-throw to send the ball backward. That was a rule many people learned for the first time on Sunday. Including Campbell.
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