Yesterday, LiberallyLean posted some hot sports opinions about coin flip tosses“Coin flip talk: I distinctly remember that before any NFL game that the ref would tell a player to “call it in the air” for the initial coin toss. Now they have the player choose heads or tails before it is flipped. That seems wrong.”I believe I know the history of this, and it involves a girl in my Sunday school class and her father who was a member of the church, an NFL referee.Here’s what started it all. On Thanksgiving 1998, the Steelers and Lions were heading to overtime. Overtime rules were different then, and involved a coinflip. Referee Phil Luckett explains the coin toss rules and tells Jerome Bettis to call it in the air. He distinctly says, “Tails.” But, Luckett said “heads” was called. The Lions instead got the ball and kicked a game-winning field goal 3 minutes into overtime. The NFL quickly changed the coin-flip format to prevent similar disputes. Now, instead of calling the toss while the coin is in the air, the team captain chooses heads or tails before the coin is flipped and the referee confirms the selection before he flips the coin. Luckett took a lot of heat and was later involved with two other controversial calls. One is the Music City Miracle “lateral.” You can read about the other one on his Wikipedia page. I believe there’s another one involving him and a receiver bumping into each other on a crucial play. I felt bad for the man and his daughter. So many people in the nation were calling him an idiot and I bet the family didn’t like the attention. Twitter wasn’t a thing back then. For the longest time, I thought her father had one of the coolest jobs. If my dad had that job, I’d probably be boasting about it. But then in an instant, everyone in the nation is making fun of or hating on the man you admire and love. I imagine despite the love and respect she had for her father it was hard to go to work and social events in the short term with everyone knowing who her father was and what he was responsible for. I did a little searching on what he’s doing today and it appears he does some speaking engagements, which I’m sure are interesting to hear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsznFZv-wBs
