Joe Mixon: You can never leave it in the referee’s hands

The Texans made some history in Kansas City on Saturday.

They became the first team to lose a playoff game while outgaining their opponents by more than 100 yards and not turning the ball over. There were several areas to point to when trying to explain the 23-14 loss, including eight punts by the Chiefs defense and three missed kicks by kicker Ka’imi Fairbairn, but a couple of calls by the officials also stood out.

A roughing the pass call on defensive end Will Anderson on third down on the Chiefs’ second possession led to a field goal and an unnecessary roughness call on a very late slide by Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in the third quarter helped set a touchdown up. . Head coach DeMeco Ryans said after the game that the Texans knew it would be them against everyone in Kansas City and Anderson echoed that sentiment in his own comments.

Running back Joe Mixon said the game was a reminder to take care of things on your own.

“Everybody knows what it’s like to play up here, you can never leave it in the hands of the judges,” Mixon said, via Aaron Wilson of KPRC. “But I mean the whole world sees it for what it is, bro. It is what it is.”

Umpire Clay Martin told a pool reporter that the umpires observed “forced contact to the facemask area” on the roughing call and that “the burden is on the defender” to avoid the same kind of forced contact to Mahomes’ head despite the timing of the slide. Those explanations will be of little comfort to anyone in Houston, and they make it all the more important that the Texans, according to Anderson, “find a way to get us over this hump and stop making the same mistakes over and over and over.”