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Sunday, December 23, 2001

By Ed Bouchette, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

Rookie referee Terry McAulay should send Cleveland Browns fans a thank-you note. If they hadn't thrown all those beer bottles, his atrocious handling of the game that provoked their outburst would have been the focus of everyone's ire around the league the past week.

McAulay should be disciplined by the league, which has done a good job of covering up for him in what blatantly appeared to be an illegal replay review near the end of the Browns' game against Jacksonville.

Television tapes showed that McAulay never made a move toward the buzzer on his belt that would have signaled that the replay official in the booth wanted to take a look at a 3-yard, fourth-down pass to Cleveland's Quincy Morgan that was ruled complete for a first down at the 9. A Cleveland writer reported that no such movement by McAulay could be detected either after he viewed the Browns' coaches tapes from the game.

"There was no hand thrown, flag thrown, whistle blow, any kind of hand signals or gestures that the beeper had gone off," Browns Coach Butch Davis said.

Cleveland quarterback Tim Couch clearly spiked the ball before McAulay made a move toward his buzzer. He even signaled the spike incomplete (because Couch double-pumped, it would have been an intentional grounding penalty). Only then did McAulay react to his buzzer. Under strict NFL replay rules, once a play has been run, a previous play cannot be reviewed.

That play likely will provoke a movement to have the instant replay system altered in the off-season, even though NFL owners voted it in through the 2003 season. As it stands, coaches have two challenges in each half to ask for a review on replay of a disputed call on the field. In the final two minutes of each half, however, the coaches cannot challenge and it is left in the hands of an NFL official in a booth upstairs.

"I guess it can be changed," Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt said, "but probably what they'll want to do is improve whatever went wrong here, and I don't know exactly whether it was the buzzer didn't work, or what it was."

An official in the booth blew one in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day when he failed to review what looked to be a touchdown pass by Lions rookie Mike McMahon in the closing seconds of their game against Green Bay. The pass was ruled incomplete on the field. That official was taken off the hook, too, because the Lions scored a few plays later.

"I never have been an enthusiast of the instant replay," Hunt said. "It's just an imperfect system. The game needs to be natural down on the field. I never could have dreamed up this circumstance. It does verify in my mind, you don't want to interrupt the flow of a game. But everybody tries hard, the officials try hard, and the system, they've worked at it, but there are still flaws in it."

McAulay also should have reset the clock in Cleveland and did not. The clock was moving until Couch spiked the ball with 48 seconds left. But since McAulay overturned the previous play, the clock should have been reset to 1:02, not that it mattered in the outcome.

But bringing the players back onto the field did not matter in the outcome, either. The one thing McAulay did correctly -- by any common-sense approach -- was rule the game over because of the dangerous situation from the rioting fans. NFL rules prohibit an official from doing that, however, a job only commissioner Paul Tagliabue can perform. So, Tags should have done it. Instead of calling and ordering the players back onto the field -- some after they had showered -- so Jacksonville quarterback Mark Brunell could run out the clock with two meaningless kneel-downs, Tagliabue should have called it a game.

Instead, after running out the clock, both teams and the officials had to endure another shower of beer bottles as they ran off the field a second time.

It was not a shining moment in Cleveland last Sunday, but Browns fans weren't the only ones to blame, just the most visible.