To a lot of viewers, the call was pretty straightforward: tight end T.J. Hockenson pulled off a sensational Superman touchdown. Consider the star Viking among those who believed it was a catch.
After the game, Hockenson stepped in front of the microphone. His words say quite a bit; so does the tight end’s body language. He appears to be one who is working through ample frustration and confusion, gobsmacked by an obvious outcome — a touchdown — getting turned into an incomplete pass. Essentially, the Vikings’ home run got turned into a long foul ball even though the ball appeared to sail over the wall while being in the field of play.
Star Viking Isn’t Pleased by Touchdown Taken Down
Minnesota lost the ball game by a score of 28-22. Seeing two touchdowns peeled off the board didn’t help.
Start off with the Jalen Nailor touchdown. Carson Wentz found the WR3 for a nice score in the 2nd quarter. But while the game appeared to be moving toward 14-10, the referees called a holding on Blake Brandel. As a result, the move was to opt for a field goal, making the game 14-6 instead. One could make a pretty solid case that Mr. Brandel did nothing wrong (my belief).
Closer to the end of the game, there was a spectacular score from Mr. Hockenson. The issue, per the NFL, is that it wasn’t a completed pass.
The tight end couldn’t help but disagree. “I don’t understand where that’s coming from,” Hockenson explained, “hands are underneath the ball. Yeah, it’s ridiculous.” He continued to take on the topic, shaking his head in disbelief while calling the decision to take the touchdown off the board “crazy.”
The tight end sees an issue with the league intervening from New York: “There was nothing to overturn.” Hockenson would say that “they got to figure it out” since “New York can’t call in and say that it’s not a catch when every other ref out there says it is.”
At the risk of being overly contrarian, I’ll push back on what Hockenson is saying. The league office — the people in New York whom Hockenson is referring to in his answer — are well within their rights to intervene in the game. In fact, doing so often leads to the correct call. But therein lies the key: getting the call correct.
The modern NFL is trying to accomplish two things by allowing command center to jump into games: efficient accuracy.
Fans, understandably, don’t want a pile of inaction in the moments when a call needs to be reviewed. The ability to get something called correctly is paramount but there’s nevertheless some pressure to make an efficient determination. With the T.J. Hockenson score, the camera angles appeared to show what was a spectacular touchdown catch.
The all-powerful officials in New York decided otherwise.
The Vikings are not a 3-3 football team due to a botched call at the NFL office building. Rather, the Vikings are a 3-3 football team because the quarterback play has been too inconsistent, the turnovers too ample, the run defense too shaky, the tackling too ineffective, and so on. But, to be sure, the league didn’t make life easy for Minnesota by ruling that T.J. Hockenson’s touchdown wasn’t a touchdown.
T.J. Hockenson, 28, comes in at 6’5″ and 248 pounds. He is sitting on 25 catches, 196 yards, and 1 touchdown in 2025 (stats).
He’ll look to score in Week 8 as the Vikings head down to Los Angeles for a Thursday Night Football game against the Chargers.
