[mikesears]

Originally posted by gsf23
I don't know if this is what you are looking for but here goes. We have a 2nd and 8. Ball is spotted and our sideline is on the wide side of the field. We split a receiver out wide to our side so the wing official is close to our sideline still. Play is an off-tackle to the short side of the field. Running back goes into the line and the wing official on our side blows his whistle. Right after he whistles, the ball comes flying out of the pile, defense recovers and the WH signals first down the other way.

As you can guess, we are yelling for the inadvertant whistle. The wing official refuses to go tell the WH he blew his whistle so we start yelling and get the WH's attention. He comes over and we tell him about the IW. Wing finally admits that he blew his whistle. WH tells us since it was away from the play, no one heard it and it didn't effect the play, the call stands. We keep insisting that we should keep the ball because we had posession at the time of the whistle. Finally he calls his crew over, they go off and discuss for about 2 minutes and give us the ball back at the spot of the whistle, third down.

Did the coach ask for a coach-referee conference by calling a timeout to discuss the misapplication of the rule? When they corrected the mistake, the timeout would then become an official's timeout.