• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This is all to say that Al Davis is no friend of the league, and that the league is no friend of Al Davis. I’d like to be able to say that they’ve managed to peacefully coexist, but that’s not true. Instead, they coexist despite what can best be described as open resentment. And in moments like these, with a national television audience watching and a so-called team of destiny’s season on the line, it wasn’t completely out of the question for him to suggest that someone on-high influenced Coleman to overturn his call.

Asked about the call by a perilous interviewer some time later, Davis said,

It’s my opinion—the opinion of almost everybody in the world—that the play was a fumble [and] should have been called a fumble. That someone would reverse it without conclusive, indisputable, visual evidence is just unbelievable. To this day we don’t know what happened. We don’t know who made the call. I know who made the call verbally, but I don’t know who made the call, what was said amongst the replay guy upstairs and the official downstairs. I don’t know who else was in the booth. I know of things that were done with the networks [in the past]. I know that the head of officials is still out there trying to spin it, that we had a tuck rule, and that it was really not a fumble. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Ridiculous, indeed.

EVIDENCE AGAINST A CONSPIRACY

Defenders of Walt Coleman, such as Mike Pereira, point to a literal interpretation of Rule 3, Section 21, Article 2, Note 2.

“The rule is very specific,” Pereira told the Washington Post’s Mike Maske in a 2005 interview after a similar call had been made in a game between the Washington Redskins and the Denver Broncos. “We have to make our decision based on the rule. Intent doesn’t factor into the rule. Does the ball come out after [the quarterback’s] arm is going forward and before he tucks the ball back into his body? If so, then it’s an incomplete pass.”

“Under the rule, a quarterback’s throwing motion begins when he raises the ball in his hand and begins to move his arm forward,” Maske explained further. “That motion doesn’t end until the quarterback tucks the ball back against his body, making him a runner. If the ball comes loose any time in between, it’s an incomplete pass, not a fumble. Only if the quarterback reloads—and raises the ball again to start a new throwing motion—can he fumble, as long as the ball is knocked loose before his arm begins to move forward again.”

Under that complicated interpretation, Coleman’s call certainly makes more sense than it did in the heat of the moment. But to me, the most compelling argument against the Tuck Rule conspiracy theory (beyond dismissing Davis as a paranoiac) is also the simplest: right or wrong, the call itself didn’t decide the game. After the ball was spotted, the Patriots were still outside of Vinatieri’s range. And furthermore, they were still playing on a snow-blanketed field in blizzard-like conditions. The Patriots had no timeouts remaining, and had to rely on Brady, an inexperienced second-year player who had yet to show more than flashes of his future greatness, to carry the team toward a realistically makeable field-goal attempt. Though he had played college ball in the northern climes of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the California native had never before played in conditions like these. Who had? But Brady still needed to make a first down to keep the chains moving. And once he managed to complete the pass to Patten, the Patriots still needed to get to the line and execute the kick before time expired. Vinatieri, of course, still had to make the field goal. This was all just to tie the game, mind you. Overtime was another story entirely.

Barring the extreme unlikelihood that Walt Coleman was in possession of a two-headed coin, it seems impossible that the refs could have fixed the overtime coin toss. This means that as the visiting team, the Raiders could have conceivably won the toss, elected to receive, and driven for the game-winning