Most players I've spoken to want consistency so they can have a baseline for how to perform during a game. If an officiating crew is going to call holding more often than another, players can adjust, but they don't want to wait until the fourth quarter. Teams and even agents track this stuff with the crews during the regular season and inform their players accordingly.

It's true this had been a relatively hands-off game, with the only other judgment call on the books before the fourth quarter having been an offensive pass interference call on Eagles wideout Zach Pascal. In this particular instance, though, the most obvious missed call in pass coverage before the Bradberry play had been ... a play in which Bradberry grabbed Smith-Schuster's arm on third-and-8 in the second quarter and no flag was thrown.

Social media also reinforces our worst habits as football fans. A conspiracy theory about the game being decided for the Chiefs spread farther and wider than Bradberry's admission of guilt. It's incredibly easy to share screenshots and video clips of bad calls, even if some of those calls aren't actually wrong, which was the case with many of the decisions in the Bengals-Chiefs game. Thirty years ago, you might have seen a clip of a bad call once on Sunday and then never again. Now, those plays show up in social media timelines over and over for days afterward. I'm not complaining about social media -- fans will be fans and the technology can be helpful, too -- but the access we have to watch and rewatch bad (or secretly correct) calls is wildly different from what we had when those calls were equally as bad as 30 years ago.

The league should be embarrassed about an element of the game Sunday, but that would be the quality of the field, not the refereeing. Likewise, although the Eagles would have loved to have seen Bradberry get away with a holding call with the game on the line, they lost this game because they couldn't stop the run, they let Toney take a punt 65 yards to set up a touchdown, they handed the Chiefs a touchdown on a fumble recovery and they allowed the Chiefs to go 4-for-4 in the red zone. They also committed a penalty at exactly the wrong time, even if that penalty yielded an unsatisfying finish.