Alouette Protest Overturned

Published on September 9, 2009 6:40 PM by dbo.

Inevitable, considering:

how hard it is to prove intentional misapplication of a rule by official.
any decision to uphold the protest and declare the game a time or replay the final minute would be precedent setting.
the protest by-law is not meant to correct referee bungling of a game (instant replay was supposed to do that).

That said, hopefully the following lessons are learned:

Using pagers to notify officials of play reviews was asking for this to happen. What about having the time-keeper running onto the field, a buzzer or some other notification through the sound system so there is no doubt from anyone in the stadium regarding the timing?
Worrying about the proper clock setting before a play is not that important (certainly not important enough to create this kind of fiasco) when you can just add the time difference at the end of the next play.
The injustice to Montreal was that they had to replay their third down play three times (once because of a late time-out, once on the touchdown play that was nullified and finally on the official third down play they were stopped on). However, early reports indicated there was a penalty against Montreal on the nullified play which would have required it to have been replayed anyway (with the appropriate penalty yardage). Interestingly, this was not mentioned in the protest decision statement, so apparently there was no penalty against Montreal on the play.

Great to see the CFL get this done and out of the way and not wait until next week.

This link is tagged with protest.

cfldb