CFL ADMITS ‘MISS’ IN THE HANDLING OF ADAMS AFFAIR
Not ejecting Als quarterback just might have cost Blue Bombers a crucial win
Canadian Football League officials made a big mistake on Saturday and owned up to it on Tuesday.
A day after Montreal Alouettes quarterback Vernon Adams, Jr., was handed a one-game suspension for swinging a helmet and striking Winnipeg Blue Bombers linebacker Adam Bighill on the chin, the league’s director of officiating said Adams should have been ejected from Saturday’s game as well.
Had Adams been thrown out with 6:20 left in the fourth quarter, it very well could have changed the final result, which was a 38-37 Montreal win that included two touchdowns engineered by the Alouettes quarterback in the final 2:16 of the game.
“It’s a miss,” CFL director of officiating Darren Hackwood said. “It’s safe to say that he should have been ejected for what he did.”
The acknowledgment of the mistake and the suspension handed to Adams do nothing to help the Bombers now.
In a dogfight for first place in the West Division at 9-4, they are still trying to figure out how they blew a 24-point lead and lost in Montreal.
Meanwhile, Adams is suspended for the Alouettes’ game on Saturday in Vancouver against the 3-10 B.C. Lions. It’s a game that is unlikely to have much bearing on the final standings.
Bighill was incensed after the game and spoke out on social media about the fact that refs messed up the call, even though Adams was handed a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty for ripping off Bighill’s helmet.
“I stood up and looked right at the ref who looked right at the incident and saw it,” Bighill said Tuesday. “Immediately I knew that was an ejectable offence.
The fact that it wasn’t taken care of the right way initially is frustrating, but you can’t change things. (Adams) came back, played a great game. He earned that win. You’ve got to live with it.”
While Bighill believes back judge Jocelyn Paul was looking right at the entire incident, that is not the CFL’s version of events.
Hackwood said neither the officials on the field, nor in the video replay command centre had a good enough view of the incident to make the call in real time.
“We’re not gonna guess and eject a player,” Hackwood said. “We tell our officials they need to see the whole action. We’re not making things up. He just didn’t see enough of what happened, clearly enough, to eject the player.”
The incident occurred after Bombers safety Jeff Hecht intercepted an Adams pass near the goal-line late in the fourth quarter.
During the return, Bighill and Adams were blocking one another and eventually Adams grabbed the Bombers linebacker by the face mask and wrestled him to the ground while ripping off his helmet.
As the scrum continued, Bighill stood up, while Adams grabbed the helmet in his left hand and swung it toward Bighill’s unprotected face. It has been confirmed by the league that the helmet clipped Bighill on the chin.
A flag was thrown by head referee Ben Major and Adams was assessed a 15-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness. The flag was specifically thrown for the act of tearing the helmet off Bighill’s head. Hackwood said Major was blocked and did not see the helmet-swinging incident.
Paul was much closer to the incident, but his job as back judge at the time was to watch the football, Hackwood explained. At the time, he would have been watching Hecht, who was just going down as the Adams-Bighill incident occurred.
The play was reviewed by the command centre and the unnecessary roughness penalty was upheld.
However, Hackwood said the command centre did not have an angle that definitely showed Adams swinging his helmet and connecting with Bighill.
“You never get a reverse angle here,” Hackwood said. “So you never see the helmet, where it connects, how it’s swung. Something happens on the ground.
You see Vernon pick up the helmet and start to move with it, but you don’t really see clearly what happened.
“We tell the command centre they need to be clear and obvious on everything. Especially if you’re gonna eject somebody, you’re not gonna guess. They don’t have the benefit of things like Bighill’s explanation in the moment or any of that kind of stuff that comes after the game.
“They stopped the game, they asked for more angles. There just weren’t any more angles ... So they left it as it was called.”
For now the Bombers have no choice but to accept the league’s explanation and admission of a mistake and focus entirely on Friday’s game against the 10-3 Hamilton Tiger-Cats at IG Field.
They didn’t deserve to win that game anyway and Adams earned full marks — and CFL top performer of the week honours — for his efforts.
Just like the Bombers will try to learn from their epic collapse in Montreal, the league’s officials can use this as a teaching moment and try to be better.
They have to be. Twyman@postmedia.com Twitter.com/Ted_Wyman