Through Saturday’s playoff game between the Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs, the officiating came into question a couple times. Afterward, DeMeco Ryans had a blunt answer when asked about some of the controversial calls.
The Texans were on the wrong end of a couple notable penalties in Saturday’s AFC Divisional Round loss. It started with a roughing the passer flag against Will Anderson, which drew strong responses from the ESPN and ABC broadcast. There was another unnecessary roughness call that got Troy Aikman fired up, as well.
When asked about some of the questionable calls, Ryans said his message was it would be Houston vs. “everybody” in Saturday’s game. While he didn’t explicitly mention the referees as part of that, he reiterated he truly meant everyone – but the Texans weren’t without their share of avoidable miscues.
“We knew going into this game, man, it was us vs. everybody,” Ryans said. “When I say everybody, it’s everybody. All the whatever – the naysayers, the doubt. Everybody, we had to go against today.
“With that, knowing we’re going into this game, who we were up against, we can’t make the mistakes that we made. We had a lot of self-inflicted mistakes that happened, whether it’s special teams not converting our kicks. Defensively, not being where we’re supposed to be in coverage. Offensively, not protecting our quarterback and not keeping him clean. You marry that on top of everything else we had to deal with, it’s going to be a really tough uphill battle.”
Aikman had strong thoughts on the roughing the passer call on Anderson, but the unnecessary roughness penalty against the Texans particularly fired him up. Patrick Mahomes dropped a snap in the third quarter and struggled to get away from pressure, sliding as a pair of Houston defenders closed in on him. Although there appeared to be minimal contact on the play, officials still called the penalty and awarded Kansas City a first down.
Aikman made it abundantly clear he didn’t like the call. As he did so, rules analyst Russell Yurk said he also didn’t think it warranted a flag. That’s when Aikman said the NFL needed to make some changes.
“They’ve got to address it in the offseason,” Aikman said. “You can’t, as a quarterback, run around and play games with defenders and then be able to call a penalty.”
