NFL Columnist: Pass Interference Replay Likely to Go Away

Kevin Kinkead | April 6, 2020

In 2019, Saints fans complained to the high heavens when Nickell Robey-Coleman, now a Philadelphia Eagle, committed a blatant pass interference penalty that was not whistled, contributing to an NFC Championship Game loss.

The NFL implemented a pass interference replay the following season, which was absolutely useless because officials never overturned anything. As such, the rule is likely one and done, according to NFL.com’s Judy Battista:

I don’t have a statistic on-hand, but I can’t remember, off the top of my head, an Eagles game this past year where a pass interference challenge actually resulted in the call being reversed.

The first time this happened was in the week two Atlanta game, and the Falcons challenged this unsuccessfully:

Looks like Rasul Douglas wrapped him pretty good on that sequence, but no dice for Atlanta.

There were a couple of other plays in the Green Bay game that were highly questionable.

This was one of them, with Avonte Maddox covering Marquez Valdes-Scantling:

Face guarding is legal in the NFL, but you can’t run into the guy and contact him before he catches the ball, which is what Maddox did. That one should have gone down as pass interference, but it didn’t.

The Eagles got dicked on another sequence in the same game when Alshon Jeffery was about to make a catch but had his left hand clearly pushed away before the ball got there:

Eventually coaches stopped throwing PI challenge flags because officials weren’t overturning anything, which resulted in lost timeouts. Now it seems like the PI replay is going the way of the Dodo bird and Passenger Pigeon, if Judy’s source is correct.