Flag or no flag?

[Texas Aggie]

It is my view that if you see clearly an unsportsmanlike act or a personal foul anywhere on the field, you should flag it -- especially during a dead ball or after a TD. There may be a few exceptions to this, but it would avoid the ridiculous situation the BJ put you in. As far as dropping your flag later when you find out what you thought was flagged wasn't, I wouldn't recommend getting into a habit of doing that, but you need to get the call right. If the BJ says honestly he didn't see it, then you say, OK, I did and here's the flag. Again, this isn't a great habit to get into but I'm a little dismayed that your crew didn't work as a team on this.

The good thing about 2 (or more) flags is its hard for the coaches to dispute that what happened wasn't a foul. I've seen as many as 5 flags fly and coaches gripe, so this isn't a given, but I start the response with something like, "we had 2 flags on that, coach; you can't seriously dispute it."