After Sunday’s 20-17 loss to Buffalo, Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid called the offsides penalty on Kadarius Toney that wiped out a would-be touchdown “a bit embarrassing” for the NFL.
Monday, Reid walked back his criticism, saying that Toney failed to check with the ref before the play.
“Normally, he looks over to the sideline and just gets an OK,” Reid told reporters. “On that one, he just happened not to. That’s the coaching point. Just make sure you check with the guy on the side just to see if you’re aligned. I mean, he’s not lining up offsides on purpose. Listen, he was two inches or an inch from being legal. Like I said, you can argue both sides of it.”
With 1:25 remaining in Sunday’s game, Patrick Mahomes hit Travis Kelce in stride. The tight end weaved past a tackler. As defenders converged, Kelce tossed a lateral to Toney, who scampered to paydirt. The flag at the start of the play, however, wiped out the score in an eventual loss.
After the game, Mahomes and Reid were hot, criticizing officials for making the call.
Reid backpedaled on Monday, saying Toney needed to line up properly.
“Do we need to line up right? Yeah, we do. We got to take care of that. We can’t put it in the officials’ hands,” Reid said.
The mistake was the latest from Toney, who owns immense talent but fails to do the little things to make himself and the team successful. Wittingly or not, the comments from Reid and Mahomes after the contest took the spotlight off Toney’s blunder and placed it on officials who made the correct call.
NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport reported on Monday morning that the NFL will review Reid’s and Mahomes’ postgame comments as there is a long-standing policy against questioning the integrity of the referees, per a source.
Reid told reporters on Monday that his frustration stemmed from the lack of communication with the officials.
“I know what I said about the officials yesterday or insinuated about the officials,” he said. “Listen, there are no excuses on this thing. That’s not what I’m saying. I’ve always had a good working relationship with these guys, and that’s the important part. They know when they tell me something with a guy, I’m going to go address the guy like right now and make sure that it gets changed. When you’re talking about inches, those types of things, and those happen in the game — I’ve been doing this a long time — this isn’t an excuse or a blame on the officials for blowing the game. That’s not what it is. But it’s that working relationship. That part is so important in this thing. Cause you can see it on both sides, whether it’s a defensive player lining up in the neutral zone at times or that. You give a head coach a heads up, and then, in our case, we tell them. And then if they get called, listen, you were warned. That’s how it’s worked over the years. That’s what I was really trying to get across.
“I take a lot of pride in taking what the officials give me and going to our players and telling them. Like, immediately telling them and giving them that. Telling them that, ‘Hey listen, they’re giving you a warning, if you don’t do it, that’s on your plate.’ That’s the important part that I was trying to get across but probably not very well after the game.”