Special shout out to the Texans and Bears for deciding that one boring half of football was enough.
After a kinda bland first two quarters of Sunday Night Football, Chicago and Houston decided to reward the people on hour 12 of football with a little bit of drama. On the tail end of a Caleb Williams scramble, the rookie quaterback was pretty clearly out of bounds when Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair came in hot and knocked Williams down.
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That, of course, did not sit particularly well with every single offensive lineman on the Bears' sideline, all of who magically appeared out of nowhere to surround Al-Shaair and bump him a bunch of times. It was the epitome of a sports fight, in that no one was really doing anything but it sure seemed intense. And then Al-Shaair decided it should be a normal fight and punched Roschon Johnson in the face. What there wasn't, however, were any penalty flags! At all!
The Texans got away with a couple big penalties in a pretty important moment
Not only did the hit on Williams not draw a flag for being a late hit, but the refs missed a punch that would have otherwise normally gotten a player kicked out. That's what NBC's officiating correspondent Terry McAulay thinks, at least. While explaining what happened on the broadcast, McAulay explained that since no flag was originally thrown on the play, the refs couldn't use replay to reassign a flag. If Al-Shaair faces any sort of discipline, it'll come from the league sometime this week.
So definitely file this away in Things You Love To See. The Bears were on the wrong end of a rough moment for the refs, so just get ready for that conversation this week. But we got our first real football fight of the season, so that's fun. Maybe it's best to just concentrate on that and not the fact that the Texans absolutely got away with maybe the two biggest penalties of the night in a span of 90 seconds.