Written by David Birkett at Detroit Free Press.com
One minute he was strutting around the end zone, staring into the stands, the look of a stone-cold killer in his eyes. The next, Golden Tate was tossing his helmet to the ground in a fit of frustration, stunned – like most everyone else in Ford Field – at what he’d just heard.
The Detroit Lions had a win stolen from them in the cruelest of fashions Sunday, when Matthew Stafford appeared to throw the game-winning touchdown pass to Tate with 8 seconds left, only to have the score overturned on replay and the game ended by a mandatory 10-second clock runoff.
Lions coach Jim Caldwell said the replay decision was correct – Tate was touched on the back of his shoulder by Atlanta Falcons safety Brian Poole as his knee hit the ground with the ball inches short of the goal line – and officials applied the runoff properly, too.
But that didn’t make the sting of a 30-26 loss to the defending NFC champions any less agonizing for a Lions team that once again was on the wrong end of an innocuous rule.
“Real tough,” Lions safety Glover Quin said. “Never saw one like that.”
“It’s crazy,” added defensive tackle Akeem Spence. “It’s just, it sucked the life out of me because I was up there jumping up cheering, our offense scored the game-winning drive and just to lose it like that on a 10-second runoff. Not knowing the rule is kind of, ‘Ah, that sucks.’ But I mean, the rules are the rules.”
The Falcons, the only undefeated team left in the NFC, led the entire game Sunday. They scored the first 10 points and led 17-3 late in the second quarter, but the Lions’ opportunistic defense intercepted three Matt Ryan passes and gave them three late chances to win.
The Lions went three-and-out on their first two of those drives, before driving the ball to the brink of the end zone on the game’s final 11-play, 85-yard, penalty-filled possession.
Stafford completed a pass to Marvin Jones at the 2-yard line with just over a minute to play, but that gain was called back on a holding penalty by fill-in offensive guard Zac Kerin.
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