Every week of the 2022 NFL season, we will celebrate the electric plays, investigate the colossal blunders, and explain the inexplicable moments of the most recent slate. Welcome to Winners and Losers. Which one are you?
Loser: Excessive Celebration
The NFL’s rule book outlaws celebrations that are “excessive,” which is a subjective measure. To truly gauge whether a celebration is excessive, you have to determine an appropriate amount of celebration for a certain accomplishment. For a first down when trailing by seven in the first quarter? Anything more than a smile is excessive. But let’s say a player hypothetically made a spectacular Hail Mary touchdown catch at the very back of the end zone—the deepest catch ever recorded—to win a game, putting his team in first place in their division, just weeks after they’d fired their coach. It’s hard to imagine any celebration that would be excessive. Any amount of screaming, gesturing, alcohol consumption, pyrotechnic displays, musical performances, and a certain amount of tasteful stripping would be tolerated.
Unfortunately, this was not a hypothetical scenario. In Sunday’s Panthers-Falcons game, with possession of first place in the NFC South on the line and the Panthers trailing by six points, Carolina QB P.J. Walker threw a stunning 62-yard touchdown pass to D.J. Moore.
It’s a dream of a play, the type of inexplicable, unpredictable lightning bolt that keeps us watching games every Sunday. Walker isn’t supposed to have a great arm—a few weeks ago, he literally didn’t complete any passes more than a yard past the line of scrimmage—and yet he threw this ball 67 yards on the fly. Since the NFL began utilizing ball tracking technology in 2016, it’s the longest completed pass on record.
Moore somehow got open behind a defense specifically designed to stop this exact play, outsprinting two Atlanta defenders to the back of the end zone. The ball must have felt like a ton of bricks as it tumbled down from the rafters and hit Moore’s hands, but he snugly tucked it in over his shoulder while tumbling to the ground. Touchdown. The Panthers, who fired their coach three weeks ago and traded their biggest star last week, were an extra point from taking the lead in the dismal NFC South.
But Moore broke the rules. He took his helmet off while celebrating the greatest moment of his career. And the rule book specifically forbids removing the helmet during a celebration. That penalty cost the Panthers 15 yards, enforced on the extra point kick that would have given Carolina the lead and a certain win. The PAT was now a 48-yard attempt—and Eddy Pineiro missed it.
When a player commits a dead ball penalty after a touchdown, the opposing team has the option of enforcing it on the PAT or the ensuing kickoff. Most of the time, the opposing team chooses to enforce the penalty on the kick. But in situations where that one point really matters? You push the extra point back. It happened on the famous Egg Bowl Dog Pee incident in 2019, when current New York Jets receiver Elijah Moore celebrated a would-be game-tying touchdown by pretending to be a urinating dog, drawing a flag, and contributing to a missed extra point, and a 21-20 loss. The last celebration-fueled NFL missed extra point came in 2020 after a Jarvis Landry touchdown. (Landry had also caused a missed extra point in 2019 and told reporters “I’d do the exact same thing,” so good on him for being true to his words.) But I can’t find another instance of a celebration-penalty-missed-extra-point combo in such a critical moment.
Sunday’s game in Atlanta went to overtime, where Pineiro missed another game-winning attempt—this one a 32-yarder from roughly the same distance as the PAT would have been without the penalty. It was a stunningly bad performance from Pineiro, who hadn’t missed a PAT this season and hadn’t missed a field goal from under 40 yards since Week 8 of the 2019…
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