NFL offers lame explanation for why 49ers lineman was not ejected for punching player
As the first half of Thursday's San Francisco 49ers-New York Giants game came to a close, the 49ers took a knee to run out the clock and get the game to halftime. During that kneel-down, Giants defensive lineman A'Shawn Robinson was a little aggressive and ruffled the feathers of 49ers offensive tackle Trent Williams.
That resulted in a brief skirmish where Williams pretty clearly struck Robinson with a punch to the face mask.
That is clearly a closed fist and looks an awful lot like a punch to Robinson's face.
According to NFL rules, any player who punches is another player is automatically ejected.
While there were offsetting personal foul penalties called for this altercation, no ejection was made: not by the on-field officials and not by the NFL offices that have the authority to call in and eject a player for such an infraction.
The NFL explained after the fact, via ProFootballTalk, that it "couldn’t confirm that 100 percent from the standpoint of was it truly a closed fist with a strike, we just couldn’t determine that.”
Referee Walt Anderson also issued a statement to a pool reporter.
"When we have a flag thrown on the field for unnecessary roughness, members of the officiating department are able to review available video, Rule 19, to determine if there is a flagrant action that should result in a disqualification," Anderson said. "We ended up looking at the video we had available to us, and we just didn't see anything that rose to the level of flagrant, which is the standard that we have to apply to disqualify the player."
It is not hard to look at the above video and see what Williams's intent was and what his fist looked like when he struck Robinson.
Williams called it a "love tap" after the game.
It was the second time in a week that the NFL missed an opportunity to eject a player for a clear infraction, also failing to do so when Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson made contact with an official during Cleveland's 22-22 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday night. The NFL explained that as saying the on-field officials did not feel the contact rose to the level of a foul (even though the NFL could have also stepped in).
The NFL tends to go over the top when enforcing some rules (roughing the quarterback, defenseless receivers, hits to the head) without any second thought or gray area but also seems to set an incredibly high bar for what it takes to actually get kicked out of a game. It is a bizarre approach in this instance and just makes it looks like the league simply does not want to eject a player from a game.
More must-reads: