NFL considering allowing replay officials to throw flags for non-football acts during games

The NFL may be getting closer to allowing replay officials to throw penalty flags during games.

The league’s competition committee is discussing this week in Indianapolis the possibility of allowing replay officials to throw flags for non-football acts during games, according to ESPN.

“You don’t just want to be expanding the Pandora’s box, but we believe that things like the non-football act, you can really, really restrict what that is,” NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent said. “That’s something that we believe that potentially there’s a little bit of tweaking in the language, that may be the first step.”

Though the chance would be extremely limited, and wouldn’t be able to change anything football-related, Vincent noted a pair of incidents from last season in which the rules official would have been able to throw a flag if this were in place.

The most notable incident came during Super Bowl LX, when New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs and Seattle Seahawks cornerback Josh Jobe got into it on the sideline. Jobe threw a punch that drilled Diggs in the facemask in the fourth quarter of that game.

The contest continued once the two were separated, and no flag was thrown.

Had the on-site replay official been allowed, they could have thrown a penalty or even ejected Jobe for the punch in the moment. Instead, as nothing was assessed in real time, neither Jobe nor Diggs were penalized.

Vincent was admittedly hesitant about the possible change and knows how frustrating it could be for a player to be hit with a delayed penalty like that during a game.

“That may be the first step in getting to putting flags on the field,” he said. “I just think in the era of legalized sports betting, just as a former player, I would’ve found it very difficult to be at Lincoln Financial [Field], a big play occurred, nothing happened real-time in the stadium and then all of a sudden, 10, 12 or 25 seconds later before the ball snapped again, I see [a flag] on the field before the next snap. I don’t know.”