After review, Jones was declared to have crossed the goal line before fumbling, so the Packers were credited with a touchdown.
The reason many Vikings fans (and, probably, Rodgers) were apoplectic about the situation was that McCarthy's act was awfully similar to an infamous mistake that Detroit Lions coach Jim Schwartz made on national television on Thanksgiving, during the Lions' game against the Houston Texans: in the third quarter of that game, Texans running back Justin Forsett was tackled by Lions defenders after an eight-yard carry... but was erroneously not ruled down-by-contact by field officials, allowing Forsett to get up and scamper for an eighty-one-yard touchdown while effectively all of the other twenty-one players on the field initially stopped playing.
The portion of the replay rule in the 2012 NFL Rulebook pertaining to the Replay Official states, in part:
This rule applies to both the James play and the Forsett play, because, as they were initially ruled on the field, the former was a fumble ("... that [was] recovered by an opponent") and the latter a scoring play. As a result, under this season's rules, both plays were subject to automatic review by the replay official.After all scoring plays, interceptions, fumbles and backward passes that are recovered by an opponent or go out of bounds through an opponent’s end zone, muffed scrimmage kicks recovered by the kicking team, after the two-minute warning of each half, and throughout any overtime period, any Replay Review will be initiated by a Replay Official from a Replay Booth comparable to the location of the coaches’ booth or Press Box.
But then Schwartz and McCarthy stepped in, throwing their challenge flags to challenge plays that were automatic challenges anyway. Back to the 2012 Rulebook:
And, indeed, both Schwartz and McCarthy were flagged for fifteen-yard penalties for throwing their challenge flags in this situation, in which they were prohibited from initiating a challenge.Coaches’ Challenge. In each game, a team will be permitted two challenges that will initiate Instant Replay reviews, except for plays when the on-field ruling is a score for either team, an interception, a fumble or backward pass that is recovered by an opponent or goes out of bounds through an opponent’s end zone, or a muffed scrimmage kick recovered by the kicking team. A team is also prohibited from challenging any ruling after the two-minute warning of each half, and throughout any overtime period. [....]
Penalty: For initiating a challenge when a team is prohibited from doing so: Loss of 15 yards.
But (as Rodgers and Nelson clearly remembered) Schwartz was penalized far beyond that. The officials in the Thanksgiving game invoked one further portion of the Rulebook's replay-official rule:
After the Thanksgiving game, NFL director of instant replay Dean Blandino explained the purpose of this rule to an NFL.com reporter:He [the Replay Official] must initiate a review before the next legal snap or kick and cannot initiate a review of any ruling against a team that commits a foul that delays the next snap.
(Frankly, I think Blandino is slightly confused; the rule in question here doesn't apply to situation in which a team is "thinking about challenging the play," but one in which the replay official is presumably doing so. Those are two separate rules, though both of them bar a replay review when the team that would benefit from the review has done something to push back the deadline for the challenge-or-not decision by illegally delaying the next snap.)"The rule was put in place really to prevent a team in a challenge situation from creating a delay," Blandino explained. "They're thinking about challenging the play, they commit a foul, jump offside, false start, now they've given themselves more time to make that decision.
"So we tell our coaches, 'Don't throw the flag.' Our officials should get to the sideline, explain to them that the play is not challengeable, and then the replay official is looking at it and he will stop the game and look at it if he deems that it needs to be stopped."
On Thanksgiving, referee Walt Coleman ruled that Schwartz, in throwing his challenge flag on an unchallengeable play, committed "a foul that delay[ed] the next snap," and as a result, the Replay Official "c[ould ]not initiate a review" of the Forsett run. (The touchdown therefore stood, helping the Texans eventually win the game in overtime.) Rodgers, Nelson, and a million Vikings fans saw McCarthy's illegal challenge of the Jones play the same way.
Sunday's referee, Mike Carey, however, saw things differently. Carey, who was fairly clearly aware of the text of the rule quoted above, told the audience that the Replay Official had already initiated the review of Jones's fumble by the time McCarthy threw the flag. Thus, he ruled, the rule that the replay official "cannot initiate a review" was irrelevant to the situation on Sunday, because that initiation had already taken place by the time McCarthy committed the penalty.
One fact that favors Carey's distinction between the Forsett and Jones cases was that, on Thanksgiving, Schwartz threw his challenge flag while Forsett was still running; there's no question that Schwartz's flag was out before the replay official in that game had "initiate[d]" anything. (Indeed, that's sort of a perverse defense of Schwartz's action: at the moment he threw the flag, the play he wanted to challenge wasn't a scoring play... yet. If the last man Forsett had to beat, Lions defensive end Lawrence Jackson, had managed to bring Forsett down at the Lions' 2-yard-line, then Schwartz's already-made challenge would have been legal, it would have been upheld, and the Thanksgiving game would have proceeded very differently.)
By contrast, it's fairly clear that McCarthy didn't throw his challenge flag until after the Jones play had been whistled dead as a Vikings fumble recovery. So the distinction Carey drew isn't clearly false or stupid.
But one has to wonder: did Carey seriously know that his replay official had initiated a review before McCarthy threw the red flag? (Thanks in part to Nelson's custodial work, did Carey even see McCarthy throw it?) Or was that just an after-the-fact rationalization to avoid the ugliness that Coleman and the league faced after the Thanksgiving debacle, not to mention Fail Mary?
After Thanksgiving, NFL fans were reasonably unanimous that the rule that victimized the Lions is a stupid one. Putting on my lawyer hat, I'm not even sure that Coleman (or the NFL brass who promulgated the interpretation he applied) is even necessarily construing the rule correctly. The rule, in and of itself, makes sense to me: it's worthwhile to prevent a team who thinks they've been jobbed on a turnover or scoring play from committing a false start or encroachment (etc.) penalty on the following snap in order to give the replay official more time to decide to reverse a call. But that's obviously not what Schwartz was doing at all. How did Schwartz (or, for that matter, McCarthy) throwing the challenge flag "delay the next snap"? It would appear that the NFL's interpretation is that an illegal challenge by definition delays the following snap and therefore invokes the rule. That's silly, but okay: it's what the rule means now.
So then there's Carey's interpretation of the rule, under which an illegal challenge doesn't kill a replay review as long as that review is initiated before a coach makes an illegal challenge. Exactly where does the rule make that chronological point? Or, in other words, what part of the rule says that it matters which happens first, the review-initiation or the illegal challenge? The rule says that if the following snap is delayed by a replay-desiring-team foul, the replay official isn't allowed to initiate a challenge. It does not say that the replay official, to the contrary, is allowed to initiate a challenge as long as he does so first. So every element of the rule that actually exists on the page was met, but Carey decided it didn't apply.
Anyway. Based solely on the result—Detroit was entirely unfairly scored on, whereas the Packers got a replay review that, by all rights, they deserved—things probably turned out for the best on Sunday in a way they didn't on Thanksgiving. It's even probably better for the Vikings to have won the game without the aid of that particular fumble call. But it's hard to avoid feeling that Carey reached the result he was looking for by (1) making up some convenient facts about which happened first (the replay official's buzz or McCarthy's flag-throw) that he didn't actually know and (2) dubiously reading a concept (the timing of those two events) into the rule that isn't actually there.
