The NFL, for reasons still neither known nor apparent, opted not to flex the game between the 2-5 Eagles and 1-4-1 Commanders out of prime time, despite multiple other compelling Sunday afternoon games.
The league did, however, flex the officiating crew out of the Sunday night game.
Via Football Zebras, Alex Moore’s crew has been moved from Eagles-Commanders to Patriots-Dolphins. Shawn Hochuli’s crew will work the Sunday night game.
The report, citing unnamed officiating sources, says that the change is “more about optics rather than a disciplinary action.”
Whatever the precise reason, it seems to be a reaction to the various bad calls Moore’s crew made in the Week 7 game between the Packers and Lions, including two questionable roughing the passer calls on the Packers and a phantom illegal hit on a defenseless player by Lions linebacker Derrick Barnes.
The optics-driven reason is simple. Moving Moore’s crew out of prime time, and relegating them to a secondary 4:25 p.m. ET broadcast on CBS, avoids Mike Tirico and/or Cris Collinsworth mentioning the rough day the crew had in Detroit.
Typically, the various crews are assigned without regard to the broadcast footprint of a given game. In this specific case, it shows that the league would rather avoid further talk about the multiple mistakes that Moore’s crew made.
Even though Raiders minority owner Tom Brady did an effective job of highlighting those mistakes to an audience of 24.67 million on Sunday.
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