Jonathan Stewart and the Carolina Panthers are playing out the string with four weeks to go. They are 4-8 one season after going 15-1, so it would be easy to throttle it down (like, say, the New York Jets this past Monday night) and put it in neutral the rest of the season.
As evidenced by the effort of Stewart in the above clip, he’s still about maximum effort. After gaining about eight yards, Stewart was flipped over and looked to be down. Instead of the play ending there, his helmet landed on the feet of a defender, which allowed Stewart to put a fist in the ground, flip completely, get up, and gain more yards for a Panthers first down.
The Chargers challenged the ruling and, as you can tell by the video and the headline, the play was upheld because Stewart was never down. Stewart deserves all the praise for the play, but how about the official that didn’t just blow the play dead? We are always making fun of officials but this guy got the call right on the field in real time.
This is from a Fox broadcast, but this play made me miss Mike Carey as the referee expert on CBS games. I would’ve loved to hear him talking throughout the review process about how Stewart was down.
