The end of the first half of the Bills/Seahawks game on Monday night was a mess. After Buffalo lined up for a field goal, Richard Sherman jumped offsides after trying to anticipate the Bills' snap count, and when the referees failed to blow the play dead, he dove at the ball and ended up destroying Bills kicker Dan Carpenter with a hard hit. Carpenter remained on the ground for a short time after the hit and appeared to be shaken up, but after the game, Sherman claimed he was going for the ball and wasn't trying to hurt Carpenter. You can watch a video of the play and see what happened for yourself:
Because Carpenter appeared to sustain an injury on the play, an injury timeout was taken and the game's referees ruled that Carpenter had to sit out for a play, much to the dismay of Bills head coach Rex Ryan. Bills quarterback Tyrod Taylor spiked the ball on the next play with three seconds left to give Carpenter an opportunity to line up for another field goal from 49 yards out, but in yet another plot twist, the referees called Buffalo for a delay of game penalty, which forced Carpenter to try a 54-yard field goal. He missed it, and it led to a lot of controversy both during and after the game, since the Bills ended up losing 31-25 and could have used that field goal towards the end of the game when they were driving with the ball.
After the bizarre sequence of events involving Carpenter and Sherman, the NFL's senior vice president of officiating Dean Blandino took to Twitter to offer up this explanation about how the refs had failed the Bills:
Plenty of Bills fans expressed their frustrations on social media as well, and at one point, even Carpenter's wife got in on the action. She posted a photo of a device called a "bander," which is apparently used for castration, on Twitter and alluded to the fact that she would like to use it on Sherman. She also referred to Sherman as an animal in one of the hashtags in her tweet:
Welp. Â Kaela only has a couple thousand Twitter followers and probably didn't expect her tweet to lead to any outrage. But it has been making the rounds on Twitter on Tuesday, and she has decided to leave it up and not delete it despite whatever backlash she has faced.
Sherman got wind of the message she sent out this morning and issued his own response to it:
Sherman has also rejected the idea that he did anything wrong by hitting Carpenter on a play that should have been whistled dead. He posted this on Twitter this afternoon:
Way to go, NFL. You've got another controversy on your hands. When will it end?
