As I understand the rule - and the entire problem with the rule is that no one truly understands the rule - that Corey Clement touchdown should have been overturned. By the time the ball becomes completely secured, he only gets one foot cleanly in bounds. Depending on which way the wind is blowing on any particular Sunday you could need as many eighteen steps in bounds before you can feel safe about your score, but even the most forgiving of officials tend to demand at least two upon full possession and by my count that was approximately one toe short of meeting the quota. Now, I don't necessarily have a problem with it being upheld as a touchdown. I think we would all consider that a catch if not for the NFL's recent blurring of the definition of an athletic act so fundamental that even children and dogs grow up doing it. I find the slow motion nitpicking of freakish feats completed at 1,000x the speed in real time to be inherently silly, and that's exactly what you have to do to come to the determination that that pass wasn't entirely swaddled by it's recipient. Still, by the letter of a suspect law, Corey Clement was probably out of bounds. Unfortunately for the Patriots, they just learned - for the first (and worst) time this season - that the problem with the enforcement of that law is the uncertainty regarding it. Hell, you could argue that the most dependable detail of video replay this year has been the amount of times in which it's defied conventional wisdom to work in New England's favor. You're free to say it was the wrong call, but in Austin Seferian-Jenkins, Jesse James, and Kelvin Benjamin you'd find some pretty physically imposing opposition that would argue it's the retroactive righting of injustices. At the very worst, the most consistent team in football fell victim to a little bit of inconsistent officiating. It sucks it happened to them in the Super Bowl, but - considering just about every other goddamn team had already experienced it in a huge spot well before they were even able to get that far - there's no amount of Chris Collinsworth's commentary that could possibly convince me to care...
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