September 27, 2005
A Little Clock Mismanagement: Mix-Up Added Time in Pittsburgh By JUDY BATTISTA
The Pittsburgh Steelers must have felt as if their 23-20 loss at home to the New England Patriots on Sunday went on forever. They were almost right.

Because of a mix-up with the game clock, the Steelers and the Patriots played almost an extra minute in the fourth quarter. The Patriots drove downfield in the final minute for the winning field goal by Adam Vinatieri with one second left.

According to a statement released yesterday by Mike Pereira, the National Football League's director of officiating, the game clock was improperly reset by the clock operator, Leo Pilarski, early in the fourth quarter. That added 52 seconds to the game. The game-clock operator is based in the city where the game is held but is hired by the league.

"The on-field officiating crew, which oversees the official game clock operated in the press box, failed to recognize that the clock was improperly reset," Pereira said in the statement.

With 14 minutes 51 seconds remaining in the game, Pittsburgh ran the ball from its 30-yard line for no gain. The clock continued to run, as it was supposed to. But before the ball was snapped for the next play, the Steelers were penalized for a false start, stopping the clock with 13:59 left. After the penalty was walked off, and before the ball was snapped for the next play, Pilarski reset the clock to 14:51 instead of leaving it at 13:59. After an incompletion by Ben Roethlisberger and a punt, the Patriots got the ball back with 14:19 left, instead of 13:27.

According to the N.F.L.'s rules, once the ball was snapped for the next play, in this case Roethlisberger's incompletion, the mistake could not have been corrected.

The official game clock, the one on the scoreboard, is operated from the press box, but it is overseen by the line judge, who was Byron Boston. Boston did not catch the error on the field, nor did any coach or player, apparently. But the error became obvious when the officiating crew had a routine postgame review of the game tape. The former N.F.L. official Chuck Heberling, who observes the officials on behalf of the league, told The Associated Press that a league employee in New York spotted the error while the game was going on and called the Pittsburgh press box to alert the officials supervisor Johnny Grier.

"We checked it out with the statisticians, and according to his records, everything seemed to be all right," Heberling said. But "when we ran the tape, it was obvious it was jumping," he said of the clock.

Once the mistake came to the attention of the league office yesterday morning, Pittsburgh Coach Bill Cowher and New England Coach Bill Belichick were called and given an explanation.

"It really didn't affect the outcome," Cowher said at his news conference.