jim-irsay.jpg
Getty Images

Colts owner Jim Irsay wants to see the NFL make a drastic rule change after watching his team lose a controversial game to the Browns on Sunday. 

According to Irsay, the NFL admitted this week that the officiating crew botched two key calls that both went against the Colts in the final 50 seconds of the game. To keep that from happening again, Irsay is proposing a rule that would make ALL CALLS reviewable in the final two minutes. 

"The NFL admits and understands that they did not make the correct calls at end of Sunday's Colts/Browns Game," Irsay wrote on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. "I believe we need to institute Instant Replay for all calls, including Penalties, in the last two minutes of All Games."

In the 39-38 loss, Colts cornerback Darrell Baker Jr. was hit with a penalty on two consecutive plays. With just under one minute left to play, the Browns were trailing 39-33 and facing a third-and-4 at Indy's 13-yard line. On the third-down play, not only did Browns quarterback P.J. Walker get strip-sacked, but the Colts came up with a fumble recovery that looked like it was going to end the game. However, the Browns caught a break when Baker was called for illegal contact, a defensive penalty that gave Cleveland an automatic first down. 

On the very next play, Baker was flagged for interference on Browns receiver Donovan Peoples-Jones. The problem with the call was that the pass appeared to be uncatchable, and if that's the case, then the flag shouldn't have been thrown. 

Both calls were certainly debatable, and it's easy to understand why the Colts were upset considering both penalties ended up going against them. 

The interference call gave the Browns the ball at the 1-yard line, and even then, the Colts almost pulled off a victory. Cleveland wasn't able to punch it in to the end zone until Kareem Hunt finally scored the game-winning touchdown on fourth down.

The two calls obviously played a huge part in why the Colts lost. 

Of course, bad calls happen all the time in the NFL; you just don't usually hear an owner complain about them, and there's actually a reason for that. The NFL has a chat with each team every week about various calls that were made in the previous game, and those conversations are supposed to stay confidential, according to NFL Media.

Basically, it sounds like Irsay could be in some hot water for taking his complaints public. 

As for his proposed rule change, it definitely seems like a long shot. The last time the NFL reacted to a controversial penalty by changing the rule book came in 2019 when the league decided to make pass interference reviewable after the PI no-call that the Rams got away with against the Saints in the 2018 NFC title game. 

During its one season of existence, the rule that made interference reviewable was so bad that Troy Vincent, the NFL's vice president of football operations, admitted that the league "failed miserably" by even implementing it. 

"You can't rush and just shove something in there without knowing all the consequences," Vincent said of the rule in May 2020. "And we found that out last year, live and in action, publicly. We didn't do [our due diligence] last year, and we failed, and we failed miserably."

Based on that logic, Irsay's proposal probably doesn't have a shot of getting implemented any time soon, but that doesn't necessarily mean it won't ever happen. If the NFL continues to see egregious calls made in the final two minutes of each game, other teams might eventually start to embrace Irsay's drastic proposal.