After Buffalo’s failed conversion on fourth and five with 2:01 to play in Sunday’s AFC Championship, the thrill of victory (for Chiefs fans) and agony of defeat (for Bills fans) was temporarily suspended.
Jim Nantz of CBS said, “There is a flag.”
The yellow “FLAG” graphic popped onto the bottom of the screen. Twenty seconds after saying there was a flag, Nantz cleared things up: “No flag.”
On Monday, Nantz explained what happened to Jimmy Traina of SI.com.
“When you have flags on the field, they can be thrown in the secondary, in the offensive backfield, all over the place,” Nantz said. “So, there’s a spotter that works in coordination with the broadcast team.”
In other words, Nantz didn’t see a flag. Another CBS employee who thought a flag had been thrown shared that with Nantz.
“I’m just taking what information is passed along,” Nantz said. “I’m scanning the field and for the life of me I can’t find a flag. But the graphic is up and I’m told, which [is] just part of the chain of communication, I’m told there’s a flag. The first thing you do when you’re told that is you scan the field and identify for your own edification. What are they looking at? Where did this take place? I couldn’t find it.”
During the Westwood One radio call, Kevin Harlan also said there was a flag — based on the “FLAG” designation at the bottom of the CBS feed.
“When I’m doing the game for CBS, the officiating booth in the stadium will tell our truck immediately if there’s a flag,” Harlan said. “Then our producer would tell me ‘flag’ even before sometimes it appears on the screen. We of course don’t have that luxury doing radio and we’re so high up and we’re just trying to survive play to play because our vantage point is really high and we’re trying to decipher what’s going on from a distance.
“So, naturally when I see it come up on our CBS score bug at the bottom of the screen, I said ‘flag.’ There are so many times a flag is thrown in the four corners of the field, you aren’t even looking there, but it’s thrown 20 yards down field or five yards in the back of the line of scrimmage. A lot of times you scan it, but a lot of times you don’t see it. Even when we’re doing TV, you don’t see the flag. So, I have relied on TV when I’m doing CBS that the word coming from the officiating booth to our truck to me in the booth says a flag is down. Even if I don’t see it, I trust that process.”
A process that rarely short circuits went haywire during one of the most critical moments of the year. Whether it was a yellow shoe or yellow glove or yellow snow or something else the spotter thought the spotter saw, it caused millions to collectively hold their breath — before some exhaled and others let the expletives fly.
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