Best: Upon further review, Pereira is lights out
Fox NFL rules analyst Mike Pereira monitors action from the Fox command center in Los Angeles. Credit: Fox
At New Meadowlands Stadium, 80,000 people literally were in the dark. Across America, millions more were, too, figuratively so.
But in a studio in Los Angeles, Fox soon was flipping its emergency enlightenment switch Sunday, and there was Mike Pereira, explaining what was going on and what might happen next.
Pretty good for a guy who said he never had witnessed a situation quite like it in his career.
It is his job, though, just as it was when he was an NFL official and later supervisor of officials, to know rules so well that even the inexplicable can be explained, or at least adjudicated.
The only difference now is that he does it for the public, where as Fox's rookie rules analyst, he has been the most valuable television innovation this season.
(Fox senior producer Bill Brown went a step further Monday, calling Pereira "the best thing to happen to football since the yellow first-down line.'')
Pereira loves the new gig. "I get to be so involved on Sundays, just like I was before,'' he said, "but on Mondays, I get to play golf and don't have to listen to coaches calling me and GMs and the [team] president.''
So far, he said, he is 34-for-34 predicting results of replay challenges. "I have held my breath a few times,'' he said. "I know everybody is waiting for [a mistake].''
No major American sport has more complex rules and thus no sport has its rules more misinterpreted. Pereira often is there to save announcers from themselves.
Sunday, that meant coming on after the lights first dimmed to explain that the decision to stop or start play rests with the referee. So when Bill Leavy spoke to the coaches, he sought input, not votes.
After that, the NFL's command center in Manhattan takes over, and only the commissioner can suspend a game altogether.
Brown was watching in the control room in L.A. when during an update segment, the monitor showing the Meadowlands suddenly went blank. Uh-oh.
Communication had been cut off with Fox personnel there, so no one knew that the lights had gone out. After they came on, it took a few more minutes for TV equipment to fully reboot.
An official in the press box tried to keep the game from resuming until Fox was ready but was unable to get word to the field before the Giants had run one untelevised play.
It was an incomplete pass; the Cowboys were penalized for illegal contact.
"There was a lot of confusion,'' Brown said. "We didn't realize we had missed a play until three or four minutes later.''
It was another unusual day in a checkered first season for the new stadium, which has had two weather delays and one blackout delay and has been a target of complaints about everything from prices to decor to crowded escalators.
For Pereira, there has been little but positive reviews, including from his former colleagues, who he said are happy to have an informed voice counter the gospel of announcers.
One more question about Sunday: What would have happened if the lights had gone out during a play, say when the ball was in the air on a long pass?
Pereira said it would be treated as an inadvertent whistle. In the above example, the play is nullified and the down replayed. But on a running play, the team that had the ball when the lights went out would be given the option of restarting from where the ball was when the blackout hit or replaying the down.
Interesting. And accurate!
