We’ve all seen it. It’s the NFL playoffs, and the Kansas City Chiefs are down by two with seventeen seconds to go. They have no time-outs, and their last hope is to somehow convert a fourth and fourteen, run up to the line, and spike the ball with just enough time left on the clock for a walk-off field goal. Just after every dad in the country tells their kid to pay attention—“Play of the game right here”—the ball is snapped, and Patrick Mahomes throws a deep pass to one of his receivers but misses him high, by a fraction of an inch. Right when the defense starts to celebrate its victory, Tony Romo’s voice cuts into the broadcast: “There’s a flag in the backfield.”

The conclusion of this story typically sees the apparent infraction replayed over and over—a defender stepped on Mahomes’s

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