When Marcus Peters walked off the field, it wasn’t the emotional outburst that most of Chiefs Kingdom believed it to be. Here’s why.
Another week brought another loss for Chiefs Kingdom, this time against the New York Jets. Emotions ran high after the game for fans and former players who watched Chiefs star corner Marcus Peters pick up a referee’s flag and throw it into the stands after a holding call on Steven Nelson.
I can understand how it looked when Peters then walked off the field, honestly, since I thought it was him walking out on his team. After calming down a bit after the loss though, I went and re-watched it, and it reminded me of something similar that happened to Travis Kelce last season.
Take a look:
Travis Kelce ejected for throwing towel at official pic.twitter.com/NcvgXKsIZw
— Vikings Blogger (@firstandskol) November 6, 2016
And compare it to this:
See the similarities? The differences between the two are that Kelce had already acquired an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for whatever he was saying to the referee. When Kelce threw his towel, this garnered him his second unsportsmanlike penalty, which resulted in his ejection.
With Marcus Peters situation, the official seemed to throw his hat because he had no other penalty flags available to toss. This is what appeared to cause the confusion and Peters saw this, so he left the field. Andy Reid conferred with the officials shortly after and once he learned that Peters was, in fact, not ejected from the game, he sent a runner to get him.
I am not here trying to defend Marcus Peters for his boneheaded move for throwing a penalty flag into the stands in the first place. That was totally uncalled for and immature, but if we are going to accuse a player for something, we should at least make sure we are in the right.
Should Peters be fined? Probably, should he be benched to start the next game? I wouldn’t put it past Andy Reid to do that. Peters didn’t give up on his team though; if anything him throwing that flag into the stands is the most fire we have seen from this defense all year.
Hopefully in the future we can see Peters put his frustrations to better use to push the team (granted his past actions do not project that happening).