The prevailing sentiment at the end of Super Bowl 57 on Sunday was that an all-time game met a lousy ending. The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles traded scoring runs all night, with both Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts, in different ways, turning in epic performances. Mahomes brought the Chiefs back from a two-score deficit on a bum ankle, while Hurts ran for a Super Bowl–record three touchdowns from his quarterback position. The score was 35-all with 1:54 left and the Chiefs facing third-down-and-8, and Mahomes overshot JuJu Smith-Schuster after the receiver ran a whip route to the sideline that became a wheel route to the end zone. The Chiefs would kick a field goal to go up 3, and Hurts, with one timeout in his pocket, would have a chance to bring the Eagles back in a classic final drive down the field.
Except not. In the course of that incompletion, an official penalized Eagles cornerback James Bradberry for holding Smith-Schuster during his route, a 5-yard penalty that comes with an automatic first down. The game, at that point, effectively ended. Kansas City killed the clock, and Harrison Butker hit an easy 27-yard field goal to win it. The Super Bowl’s decisive moment came when the flag flew against Bradberry for his coverage of Smith-Schuster.
A wide look:
And a closer one:
Was it holding? Well, yeah. We can dispense with that quickly. Bradberry admits as much …
… and the referee, Carl Cheffers, did not back off the call at all when he talked with a pool reporter after the game. “It was a clear case of a jersey grab that caused restriction.”
It was holding! And yet, people are still mad. I’m one of them!
Is it possible that the official who threw the flag on Bradberry made a good call, yet those of us who are annoyed about the end of the game still have a point? Yeah, I think so, because the modern state of officiating, combined with the never-ending cultural frenzy of the modern NFL, is designed to make all of us furious in a way that we probably will never cure.
Refereeing a sport is a brutal job. Doing it well nets almost no praise, and doing it poorly invites endless harassment. Football is a hard nut to crack in particular, because it’s perhaps the only sport where penalizable activity happens on a huge percentage, maybe even a majority, of plays. The truism that “holding happens on every play” isn’t quite true, but reffing a football game is an exercise in deciding which rulebook violations to let go and which ones to enforce. Both the NFL and college football leadership try to help their officials find the right balance, sending out notes throughout the season and highlighting “points of emphasis” where officials are meant to call the game more stringently.
That makes important context for assessing the call that decided this Super Bowl. Defensive holding is definitionally simple. It happens when a defender “grasps an eligible offensive player (or his jersey) with his hands, or extends an arm or arms to cut off or encircle him.” Bradberry did grasp Smith-Schuster’s jersey for a split second, and ideally, that’d be that. In the NFL’s book, that will be that. If you’re hoping for this to be the moment that causes a big NFL officiating reckoning, you’ll be disappointed. This was not a case of an official seeing something that didn’t happen.
The call is still a historic bummer, though, and not because of some silly notion that officials are obligated to let the players play late in a close game. There’s a common school of thought in a few sports—football, basketball, and hockey come to mind—that officials should swallow their whistles late in games so that player performance rather than official intervention decides games. That leaves out that players who break the rules are denying other players the chance to win on the basis of their performance.
The flag on Bradberry, correct as it was, stings for a different reason: It highlights how arbitrary football officiating can feel and how impossible it is to play defensive back in the modern NFL. Maybe it’s a paradox, but part of the beef with the call on Bradberry is about something he got away with earlier in the night. In the first half, as Mahomes targeted Smith-Schuster on a crossing route, Bradberry grabbed the receiver’s arm as the ball was arriving and made it impossible for the receiver to catch it.
No flag came in. One should have—probably for pass interference (a more severe penalty that would’ve given the offense more yardage), but at least for defensive holding, the call when a foul occurs before the receiver is going to make a play on the ball. The Chiefs were probably furious, and if you care about the Chiefs, the holding call that did come in on the final drive felt like justice.
But I don’t care about the Eagles or the Chiefs. I’d just like to watch a consistently officiated game, and the penalty on Bradberry didn’t feel consistent. Officials didn’t call another holding penalty all night, and the only pass interference flag came in against a wide receiver (the Eagles’ Zach Pascal). When wide camera angles become available in the next couple of days for every play of this Super Bowl, it’s unlikely that they will not show more defensive players on both teams grabbing at eligible receivers and committing callable offenses that didn’t get called. Of course those plays will show up. That’s the nature of football, and it more or less ensures that every correct call invites whataboutism over some other play.
Your view of the penalty might also depend on where you stand in the interminable holy war between advocates of wide receivers and defensive backs. The NFL, for many years, has sided with receivers, building up a rules regime that makes it supremely hard for defensive backs to cover them. The most heavy-handed way the NFL has done so has been via its “illegal contact” rule, which doesn’t exist in the college game and says that defenders cannot initiate contact with receivers at all beyond 5 yards from the line of scrimmage. (The league made illegal contact one of its officiating emphasis points in 2022.) Defensive back has never been as hard to play as it is now, and if holds like Bradberry’s were called all the time—they are not—the position would border on impossible.
NFL officiating is perpetually under fire, but fans and media have been extra on edge about it lately. Commissioner Roger Goodell took a lot of flak in the days leading up to the Super Bowl for saying the league’s zebras had “never been better,” but his overarching point seemed right: “There are over 42,000 plays in a season,” he said. “Multiple infractions could occur on any play. Take that out or extrapolate that. That’s hundreds if not millions of potential fouls. And our officials do an extraordinary job of getting those. Are there mistakes in the context of that? Yes, they are not perfect and officiating never will be.”
Maybe that’s the problem. The NFL is the most-watched thing in our entire society, and the league has gradually conditioned everyone who watches it to believe that every call is a matter of life or death. Every touchdown or turnover is picked through with the precision of someone looking through the Zapruder film. The league’s standard for using replay to overturn a call on the field is that video must provide indisputable visual evidence of a call’s wrongness, as if these are criminal trials where a defendant must be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The NFL has gotten too big, and too self-serious, for brain-poisoned football fans (present company included) to accept anything other than impossible perfection. Officials could penalize every instance of defensive holding, but games would be too long. They could penalize none, but games would be too boring. Or they could penalize only the handful that they notice. That mostly works out fine, but then when a call comes down at a critical moment, it looks like what happened on Sunday. Eagles fans will feel robbed because of a reasonable call, and they won’t even be wrong. Nobody, other than Chiefs fans, will be happy. And everyone will be back in August, ready to get furious once more.
