The Texans made some history in Kansas City on Saturday.
They became the first team to lose a playoff game while outgaining their opponents by more than 100 yards and not turning the ball over. There were several areas to point to when trying to explain the 23-14 loss, including eight sacks by the Chiefs defense and three missed kicks by kicker Ka’imi Fairbairn, but a pair of calls by the officials also loomed large.
A roughing the passer call on defensive end Will Anderson on a third down during the Chiefs’ second possession led to a field goal and an unnecessary roughness call on a very late slide by Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in the third quarter helped to set up a touchdown. Head coach DeMeco Ryans said after the game that the Texans knew it would be them against everyone in Kansas City and Anderson echoed that sentiment in his own comments.
Running back Joe Mixon said the game was a reminder to take care of things on their own.
“Everybody know how it is, playing up here, you can never leave it into the refs’ hands,” Mixon said, via Aaron Wilson of KPRC. “But I mean the whole world see what it is, bro. It is what it is.”
Referee Clay Martin told a pool reporter that officials observed “forcible contact to the facemask area” on the roughing call and that “the onus is on the defender” to avoid the same kind of forcible contact to Mahomes’s head despite the timing of the slide. Those explanations will be of little comfort to anyone in Houston and they make it all the more important that the Texans, per Anderson, “find some way to get us over this hump and stop making the same mistakes over and over and over again.”
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