Referee Clete Blakeman’s decision to make a second coin toss to start overtime between the Arizona Cardinals and Green Bay Packers on Saturday was in the interest of “basic fairness” the National Football League said Sunday. But none may have been so dizzyingly incomprehensible as the fact that the overtime coin flip had to be redone because the coin itself didn’t flip on the first attempt.
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You can see a closer look at the coin spinning through the air in this video.
After Blakeman told the teams the coin hadn’t flipped, he stuck with Rodgers’ tails call while he successfully flipped the coin a second time. “It was confusing.” Rodgers indicated he would have called “heads” on the second toss if given the choice.
Rodgers said his heads call apparently stood. The Cardinals took the ball and drove the length of the field on the first drive, scoring a touchdown and winning the game 26-20.
The coin landed in favor of Arizona but Blakeman agreed to flip the coin again. It was just tossed in the air and did not turn over at all and landed on the ground [heads]. So, obviously, we thought that was not right. Blakeman didn’t do that though and he assumed that Green Bay wanted to call tails again, which left Aaron Rodgers fuming.
Stranger things have happened, but maybe not at a coin toss.
“I don’t know what happened with the coin toss”, he said. “That is why he re-tossed the coin”. “I think we had it the first time”. Earlier Saturday in the AFC divisional playoff game between Kansas City and New England at Foxborough, Massachusetts, referee Craig Wrolstad flipped the coin and it was tails, which the Chiefs had called. Packers linebacker Clay Matthews speculated that “there was a little protective case that might have been weighted in the heads favor”.
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Blakeman handled an odd situation in the most objectively fair way possible and was lucky that the same team won both tosses.
