‘Some of the Worst Broadcasting Ever,’ ‘They Didn’t Even Know’ — Chris Myers, Jonathan Vilma Face Criticism for Call of Commanders’ Clock Mistake
· Yahoo Sports
The Washington Commanders didn’t need much from their last overtime drive Sunday against the New York Giants, just a stopped clock and a field goal try.
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They never got the kick off, letting the clock run out with no timeouts left, and the game ended in a 27-27 tie. On Monday, Yahoo Sports fantasy analyst Hayden Winks turned to the TV side, calling Fox’s broadcast of that finish among the worst ever.
Fox play-by-play announcer Chris Myers and analyst Jonathan Vilma were on the call.
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“Some of the worst broadcasting ever btw,” Winks wrote on X about Fox’s call of the final seconds.
Washington got its chance by recovering a Giants fumble with two minutes left in overtime, after both teams failed to score on their first overtime possessions. A 2-yard run by running back Rachaad White put the Commanders at the New York 24 with less than a minute to go and both teams out of timeouts.
The Commanders let the clock run, and quarterback Jayden Daniels didn’t take the snap until about 12 seconds remained. He held the ball, went down with about eight seconds left, and time expired before Washington could snap it again.
As the last seconds ran off, Myers raised the alarm on the broadcast. “They don’t have a timeout. What are they doing?”
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“They are talking like it was crazy for the Commanders to not know they didn’t have a timeout (it was crazy) but they didn’t even know,” Cory Pappas, a sports writer who covers Cal athletics, replied to Winks.
After time ran out, Vilma called the sequence inexcusable and laid out what Washington was supposed to do. “It was just supposed to be, you go, you take the knee, set up, clock, and then get out of there.”
“Vilma so bad, and Myers isn’t all that good either,” Brian Hall, a Twin Cities sports journalist who covers Minnesota sports, wrote, adding that the pair might be the worst booth in the NFL.
Whether Washington’s players knew they were out of timeouts became a question of its own. Left guard Chris Paul said after the game that it was made clear in the huddle, while tight end Ben Sinnott declined to comment when asked whether he knew the team had no timeouts left.
Patrick Daugherty, an NFL writer for NBC Sports, asked how everyone could have been so confused. “Did it say somewhere in the stadium they had a timeout or something?”
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Awful Announcing’s Tyler Lauletta wrote that it felt like Myers and Vilma were a bit late to realize what was happening, but he allowed that in the moment it was probably hard to picture anything but a run, a spike and a kick.
“I mean it’s very reasonable for the announcers to believe they were just positioning better for their kicker,” one Bears fan replied.
That kicker, Drew Stevens, had made both of his field goal tries Sunday, from 28 and 40 yards.
Before the last snap, Daniels completed 17 of 25 passes for 199 yards and ran for 103 yards and two scores, including a 38-yard touchdown run, the longest by a Washington quarterback against the Giants in franchise history. Pro Football Network’s NFL QB Impact Grade has Daniels at 76.4 through Week 5, 16th of 34 graded quarterbacks.
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Another fan put the final sequence on Daniels. “He is not a child, he can see how many TO’s and time he has.”
Commanders coach Dan Quinn saw it differently. He said Sunday that the sequencing did not fall on Daniels, that the call should have been an outside throw or a spike and that it had to come from him, since Washington did not need more yards. Daniels said it starts with him and that the Commanders have to be better at situational football.
On Monday, Quinn said he remained furious about the execution and that the responsibility starts with him. “It took entirely too long from there on to execute our strategy, from subbing to clock awareness to clocking the ball.”
Quinn said the team laid out its plan for the next game in Monday’s meeting. The Commanders, 1-3-1 and two games behind the 3-1-1 Giants in the NFC East, visit the San Francisco 49ers on Oct. 19.
This article originally appeared on Pro Football Network.