Gene Steratore has been around NFL officiating for nearly 30 years. On Sunday night in Buffalo, he saw something for the first time.
It happened in the third quarter of Buffalo’s 28-21 win over Kansas City. The officials called intentional grounding on Patrick Mahomes. Watching it live, it looked like the right call. The ball landed incomplete, far from any Chiefs receiver.
But the replay showed something the officials missed. Bills defensive end Michael Hoecht tipped the ball at the line of scrimmage. It wasn’t a huge deflection, just his fingertips grazing it enough to change where the pass ended up.
And if the ball gets tipped, it can’t be intentional grounding.
“It’s very unique, Jim,” Steratore told Jim Nantz during Sunday’s CBS broadcast. “We know that you can review a pass interference if the ball is tipped. In this scenario, Hoecht definitely touches that pass, and we see a receiver breaking to an area that looks like Patrick Mahomes is throwing to.
“I don’t see why we would not be able to review something there, because where this football lands is related directly to the fact that the ball got tipped. So in the area that gets moved around now because of the tipped ball, and I think that’s what Andy is pleading to with Carl Cheffers right now.”
Gene Steratore has never seen something like this in his career:
Intentional grounding was called on Patrick Mahomes here, but the referees failed to see that the ball was tipped at the line of scrimmage. Andy Reid attempted to challenge the ruling on the field, only to be told… pic.twitter.com/NWeWynyoRG
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 2, 2025
“Andy is not happy,” Nantz said of the Kansas City Chiefs head coach, who tried challenging the call on the field.
After some discussion, the officials determined there was no reviewable aspect of the play. The intentional grounding call stood.
“Yeah, with the intentional grounding,” Steratore said. “You know, Jim, I’ve been around for almost 30 years in this business, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen a play like that. My question would be, though, if you’re throwing the ball in the area of a player and tipped football changed that, I would like for it to be reviewable, if it’s not in fact at this point.”
“It certainly was a miss,” Nantz added.
And it certainly exposed one of the weirder inconsistencies in how the NFL handles replay. The league lets officials review whether a ball was tipped on pass interference calls. The logic there is that the ball deflects, so it’s not fair to penalize a defensive back for something that wasn’t their fault. But somehow that same principle doesn’t carry over to intentional grounding. Mahomes had a receiver running to that area, but once the ball got tipped, it looked like he’d just thrown it away.
It’s also exactly the type of situation replay assist was designed to fix. The NFL has expanded what replay assist can address over the years, adding the ability to overturn certain penalties if clear and obvious video evidence shows the flag was incorrect. The system is supposed to catch obvious errors without forcing coaches to burn timeouts and challenges on plays that shouldn’t need them.
But replay assist didn’t step in here, and it’s not entirely clear why. The tip was visible on replay. Steratore saw it immediately. Anyone watching the broadcast saw it. If replay assist can overturn a face mask or a roughing the kicker penalty when video shows it was wrong, why can’t it overturn an intentional grounding call when video shows the ball was tipped?
Steratore worked as an NFL official for 15 years and refereed Super Bowl LII before joining CBS in 2018. He’s seen just about everything the rulebook can throw at a game. When someone with that much experience says he’s never encountered a situation like this in three decades, it says something about the arbitrary gaps in what replay can and can’t fix.
The blown call cost Kansas City 10 yards and a loss of a down in a game Buffalo won 28-21. Whether it changed the outcome is debatable, but that’s not really the point. The point is the NFL has all these replay tools designed to get calls right, and they still couldn’t fix something obvious to everyone watching.