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The Touchdown Was Not Scored On Fifth Down

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There can sometimes be a weird disconnect between what people in the pressbox notice and what people watching at home notice. The TV broadcast will highlight something — say, a shouting match on the sidelines, or a random player standing isolated by himself while his position group appears to have a meeting nearby — that can go entirely unnoticed by the assembled media.

That wasn’t the case with the Redskins final drive of today’s game: the FOX tv coverage and the people keeping stats in the pressbox all seemed pretty sure that the almost-kinda-sorta tying touchdown took place on fifth down. (Or, to be more accurate, a second fourth down.)

That wasn’t the case. It was a fourth-down conversion, not a fifth-down conversion, and the confusion stemmed from a couple of specific events.
The problem, it turned out, was somewhat procedural and somewhat mechanical. Head referee Pete Morelli explained in a statement to a pool reporter that one of the two “boxes” — that is, the big numbers on sticks that let you know what down it is — didn’t change from a 2 to a 1. “The primary box on the head linesman side,” Morelli explained, “which is the main down box, had first down. So we corrected the 2.”

The play that caused the confusion was a first down throw to Anthony Armstrong, which was originally recorded as a 9 yard gain. The play-by-play looked like this:

Which meant that the next play — the incomplete pass to Roydell Williams in the end zone — was actually taking place on first-and-10, not second-and-1 as pretty much everyone in the press box assumed. But, for whatever this is worth, none of the players on the field that I spoke to had any doubt at any point.

“We knew we had gotten the first down with Armstrong catching, I believe,” Donovan McNabb said. Which turned out to be true — and which also turned out not to matter at all, given the way the PAT went (or didn’t). Still, it makes me feel slightly better to know that they were trying the run with Ryan Torain on second down rather than third, and it’s also good to know that the last score — meaningless as it wound up being — actually happened.


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