Browns 20 – Jets 13
CLEVELAND – A league-surprising 5-3 record at the midway point of the season and a bye week to bask in it hung precariously in the cool Lake Erie air last night at Cleveland Browns Stadium.
A fourth-down pass by Chad Pennington floated toward tight end Chris Baker in the end zone with about a minute left as the Jets trailed the Browns by a touchdown.
Baker leaped into the air and cherry-picked the ball out of the sky with his right hand and hauled it in.
Overtime appeared imminent.
But for what seemed like an eternity to the Jets’ sideline, suspended in hope and suspense, there was no call from the officiating crew. There were no raised arms to signal a touchdown and no indication that Baker was out of bounds after being blasted out of the end zone by Browns’ safety Brodney Pool.
Finally, after that always-unsettling officials’ huddle, it was ruled that Baker – who appeared on replay to be well within the boundary when he made the remarkable catch – would not have come down in bounds, so the pass was incomplete, thus ending a frustrating day for the Jets.
And so in the end, the score remained Browns 20, Jets 13, leaving the Jets at 4-4 and with a foul taste in their mouths as they embark on their bye week.
“[Bleeping] infuriating,” Jets linebacker Matt Chatham said, spitting out the words like darts over and over as he stood in front of his locker afterward. “[Baker] was inbounds when he was hit and that’s a call for being forced out of bounds. We thought that was pretty standard stuff.”
Chad Pennington said, “It looked like a force-out from my vantage point. It looked like he was in bounds and got forced out by the safety.”
Referee Mike Carey said the play was not reviewable by replay because it was a judgment call.
“It [the call] was made by the field judge [Mark Perlman] and the ruling was that the ball was caught out of bounds,” Carey said. “There was not a force-out on the play.”
Remarkably, the replay pretty clearly showed Baker well within bounds when he made the catch and it was Pool’s hit that forced him out.
“The force-out part is not reviewable,” Carey said. “Whether he caught the ball in bounds or out is, but there was clearly no body part that landed in bounds.”
That, of course, is because Pool drove Baker out of bounds before he landed. Very curious.
“Maybe the league needs to look at how they evaluate those plays,” Chatham said. “You can’t allow the game to come down to something the league won’t let you look at.”
Said Baker: “A play like that at the end of a game I would hope is something that would be something that’s reviewable, but . . . ”
Incredibly, Baker said the official closest to the play, believed to be side judge Tom Fincken, initially ruled Baker was forced out and that it should have been a TD.
“The referee coming from the side who had a better view was telling the other referee, ‘He was coming down in bounds,’ ” Baker said. “Then they went back and forth and they ended up saying ‘no.’ It doesn’t get much more disappointing than that.”
In the end, though, a good look in the mirror will tell the Jets they did too many things before that play to cost themselves the victory.
Pennington, by his own admission, was off, completing 11 of 28 passes for a paltry 108 yards and two INTs for a career-low QB rating of 21.1.
The Jets couldn’t run the ball either (88 yards and a 3.3-yard average) on a Cleveland defense that entered the game allowing opposing backs to average 4.6 yards.
Their defense was plenty guilty, too, allowing a Browns’ offense that entered the game dead last in the NFL and had scored a total of 88 points in six games, to rack up 147 rushing yards on it and score its second-highest point total of the season.
“There were so many little things that made that [Baker] play bigger than it needed to be,” Chatham said. “This was a game that was within our grasp that we could have and should have won. These are the ones that really hurt. Now, the reality is we’ve got 14 days to think about it.”
