Remember that play in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl 50, the one in which Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton supposedly didn’t dive for the fumbled football? The Denver Broncos recovered the fumble at the Panthers 4-yard line and scored a touchdown moments later, sealing their 24-10 victory.
But should the play have counted? If you ask Broncos linebacker Von Miller, who caused the fumble, it probably shouldn’t have.
In a chat with MMQB’s Peter King, Miller admits that he batted the ball toward the goal line after stripping it from Newton, which is illegal under NFL rules. You can sort of see the bat at the end of this clip (Miller is No. 58). Blink and you’ll miss it:
“I was being held for a minute,” Miller told King. “I thought Cam was going to jump on it, but I guess, I mean, he didn’t want to dive down there on it. I couldn’t fall on it, so I was just trying to, I don’t know, get it to one of our guys.”
Had one of the officials caught it — again, it happened pretty fast — Miller would have been flagged for illegal batting of the ball. But they didn’t, and such a play isn’t reviewable (though that may change this offseason, King reports), so that was that.
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