A guy in a striped shirt made a jaywalking call at the end of the Super Bowl. He threw a flag for defensive holding with less than two minutes left, which meant there was no recourse for Jalen Hurts and the Philadelphia Eagles, and the game – the season-ending championship – was decided by a, a, a, bystander, who let the Kansas City Chiefs burn the clock and chip a field goal for a 38-35 victory.

It was absolutely the right call.

James Bradberry did it, of course. He admitted it. He held the Chiefs’ JuJu Smith-Schuster on that third-down play, grabbed his jersey to keep him from releasing on time to the end zone where Patrick Mahomes lobbed the ball. “I was hoping they would let it ride,” he said. But the refs didn’t, and all over the country viewers at home spit out tiny bits of hamburger or put a fist in their dry wall, because while it was the right call, it came in the wholly wrong moment as far as drama was concerned. This is the argument advanced by all the other bystanders on social media from Fox’s Greg Olsen to LeBron James: that it was too small of a violation at too important of a juncture for the official to interfere.

And it’s a total fallacy. “I know it always appears to be one call that makes the game,” Eagles Coach Nick Sirianni said. ” . . . But that’s not what it is. It’s not what it is.”

It’s a misconception that if the official stays out of it, then the final score would have somehow been decided by dynamic skill, not a petty detail. Exactly what else do you think separates a winning team at that stage, but the petty detail, the killing little mistake? Know this about the greatest teams: they’re the pettiest, most punctilious outfits you ever saw.

It’s far more emotionally fulfilling to scream raw-throated at a zebra than to dwell on ticky-tacky technicalities and technique. Especially if you’re from Philly and geyserlike emotion is your fundamental disposition. You hate the zebras for injecting their crossing guard’s mentality into the spectacular contest. As Mike Oriard, a former Kansas City Chief-turned-college professor and cultural historian once observed to me on this question, deep down we consider officials “deeply unworthy” to determine an outcome. “Officials are the bureaucrats of sports,” he said.

The problem with excessive recrimination at the refs is that it blacks out all the other small truths, which are the real causes and effects of a championship. Sirianni is not just engaging in coach-speak when he says that. He’s refusing to let an emotional reaction to a flag cloud his judgment, and that suggests he’ll be back in the Super Bowl one day, because that brand of executive dispassion is what separates a great coach who builds a win-it-all organization. And if you don’t believe that, ask Andy Reid and the Kansas City Chiefs. Who, you might remember, experienced one of the most anguishing losses in NFL playoff history, by a four-inch offsides call with less than a minute left in 2019.

Four inches. That was the size of the mistake that cost the Chiefs against Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in one of the greatest AFC championship games ever. Recall: The Chiefs held a 28-24 lead with 54 seconds to go, when they deflected and intercepted a pass from Brady. For that fleeting moment, the Chiefs were assured of a trip to the Super Bowl. But there was a yellow flag on the ground. A Chiefs defender named Dee Ford had set up in an illegally aggressive posture – by four inches. The penalty overturned the interception and gave Brady a second chance, and he seized it to lead his team down the field to score, and the Pats won in overtime. They went on to the Super Bowl, while the Chiefs had to choke down that flag.

Four inches. “They said I was offsides! Was I??” Ford howled on the sideline. He was. Film showed it.

Reid could have been incensed at such petty officiating. But Reid set a different tone. He told the team, “We all could have been four inches better. We’ve got to move forward.” For the next year, “four inches” was the Chiefs’ mantra. Every day, they worked for a few millimeters of improvement. “They put their mind to it, as did the coaches, and everybody upped their game,” Reid said a year later, after holding the Lombardi Trophy.

Failure at the most elite level is always more complicated and collective than a single hapless mistake or call. The sheer complexity of an NFL organizational undertaking means there are dozens upon dozens of difference-makers in various facets that need free analysis, and by insisting that all the factors involved in it be fairly analyzed, Reid incentivized his entire organization to find the final margin between a playoff team and a trophy-holder.

Attention to seemingly petty detail long has been one of Reid’s signatures. His general manager, Brett Veach, has told the story of Reid once scolding him for leaving the price sticker on a cardboard folder that held a report. Similarly, he demands players be “on point” with the smallest techniques.

“On point” sounds vague, but it’s specific: It refers to the right biodynamic body positions to carry out powerful, precision-targeted tasks. Reid wants his players to understand how not being on point can cause a larger failure. Exactitude in hip and shoulder turns create leverage, the angles that can hem in or break out a receiver. Reid not only coaches detail; he shows his players why and how such details affect a play, a sequence, an entire chain of causality. A running back’s initial lunge matters because it helps determine how clean the pocket is for the quarterback. Which in turn affects timing, and how undistracted Mahomes’ vision is downfield. There are no marginal actions or actors.

That attention to detail, Reid remarked during the 2021 playoffs, “doesn’t mean you’re going to win every game – that’s not what I’m saying – but it’s going to give you a chance.”

Check Bradberry’s leverage on that play as it starts to unfold. The ref’s call wasn’t the critical factor. Not even close. Smith-Schuster put Bradberry on his hip immediately, so much so that Bradberry actually had to hold him twice, and still he spun open. If you want to single out a play, try Mahomes’ clean, unobstructed read of the five-man rush so he could go off on that 26-yard scramble to get his team into that position in the first place. According to Next Gen Stats, that one play elevated his team’s probability of winning to 81.2 percent. Or better yet, single out the meticulous pick-apart diagnosis by Reid that left first Kadarius Toney and then Skyy Moore so wide open for second-half touchdowns, which is what really put Bradberry in such a state of uncertainty on the play.

The final score of this Super Bowl, one of the most riveting ever, wasn’t determined by one ref’s petty call. It was determined by an avalanche of plays, of small things done right all game long, that created the final leverage.

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