Deliberately batting a loose ball is a penalty. Even if it weren’t, obviously you’d rather have your guy fall on the ball than allow the Patriots to be in the same place with less time on the clock.
http://www.nfl.com/rulebook/penaltysummaries
It was a penalty that was not called. You explain to me what is wrong with that.
I did not know it was a penalty. I wonder why they called it the way they did.
Anyway, the Steelers were not in a position to fall on it. The Patriots would have recovered the ball.
I’ll defer to your prediction about what they would have done. They hadn’t recovered it at the point at which Polamalu made his “heads-up” decision to commit a penalty rather than trying to recover it, though.
Ike came back in the game so he should be OK. Woodley, all we can do is cross our fingers I guess. I’m surprised at how well the back-ups played. Carter in particular looked like he was in position all the time.
I’ve complained many times about Arians’ playcalling but I have to admit to being pleased so far this season. I especially like the way he has been calling plays that put guys like Miller and Ward (not today obviously) out in position to block the speedy guys in space.
It’s always hard to tell during the live game but from what I could see I thought Casey Hampton played well today, everything starts from there against the run and they’ll need him on the top of his game next week.
Polamalu has a better than average sense of his ability to get a ball. I’m fairly confident that if he thought he could recover it clearly he would have. IIRC a Patriots lineman was satnding over the ball about to pick it up. Did he have his hands on it?
All in all it doesn’t really matter. There was no chance that the patriots were going to do anything even if they had recovered it.
What sheer domination that was. Nearly 2/3 of the game, the Steelers had the ball. The Patriots had few answers. I admit that I did not expect that at all. I thoroughly loved it though. A Patriots depantsing, and at the hands of the Steelers no less!
Bengals…watch out for them!
Wasn’t there something like 19 seconds on the clock when that play started? I’m pretty sure the clock would have expired before the Patriots were able to line back up and run another play had they recovered it.
I’ve been looking around and thus far you are the only one I can find claiming it was a penalty. Either nobody understands the rule or your interpretation is wrong. And it could be either, I don’t know. But everybody I’ve seen from blogs to SI to ESPN says the “Holy Roller/Casper” rule applies only to the offense, which is what I thought it was.
The commentators also mentioned it during the game. They also said that the referees could not give a penalty if they saw it on replay, since it wasn’t called on the field.
At the time, I didn’t think that it was illegal for a defender to do that, but NFL.com does reeference a rule against any player batting a loose ball towards the opponent’s goal lline. I couldn’t find info on the yardage associated with the penalty.
Still not relevant to the outcome.
If NE recovers the clock runs out before they can spike it.
NFL.com clearly indicates batting or punching a loose ball is an infraction with a 10-yard penalty. Relevant or not, you have to call it and the officials did not.
I could swear I’ve seen situations where a punter has the snap get past him, then runs after the ball and kicks it out of his own endzone to take a safety rather than have the other team recover it in the endzone for a touchdown. Am I just imagining things? Otherwise, wouldn’t that be a penalty for “Deliberately kicking a loose ball.”
In that case, the impetus of the ball is toward the offender’s goal line. Polamalu’s punch was toward the opponent’s goal line.
Alas, I was one of the thousands without power yesterday and I missed the game. The bits I heard made it sound close, but one sports-writer said it was only close in score.
It was indeed only close in score. Fun game to watch (and a relief too).
Encouraging news: Woodley says he’ll be ready to go against the Ravens. Hamstring injuries are unpredictable so that could change but at least it’s a good sign for now.
Well, Woodley wasn’t ruled out for this week by Tomlin but it sounds less encouraging now. Harrison has been cleared to practice but you can pretty much guarantee he won’t be playing either. The biggest surprise from all this? Tomlin indicated they may use a four man front against the Ravens because of the injury situation. I think it would amount to a three-man front with Keisel playing a hybrid end like Mario Williams does. Could be interesting.
Terrell Suggs says that he still “owns” Roethlisberger.
This marks the second consecutive week that someone “owns” Ben Roethlisberger. Yeah, about last week… you might want to look into what happened last week, Terrell. Someone got owned, all right.
Oh, and you’d better stop worrying about you and start white-knighting your quarterback, because Flacco is in for a long day if he looks even half as bad as he has over the past few weeks. It appears that the NFL teams have figured out what to do about Joe Flacco, and Boldin won’t be able to get 850 pass interference calls every game, which seems to be Baltimore’s primary way of moving the ball of late.
Baltimore were awful last week, and the Steelers were awesome. If both teams play the same way this week, the Ravens will get crushed like Pittsburgh did back in Week 1.
But dude, you’re starting to sound more like Dio every week with your incessant whining about stuff like this. “Ben never gets any calls. The Ravens get all the calls. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.” It’s rather lame.