The Las Vegas Raiders suffered a heartbreaking 26-19 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals in the Wild Card Round of the 2022 NFL Playoffs. The Raiders' loss to the Bengals is even more difficult to swallow because of an officiating gaffe on one of Joe Burrow's two touchdown passes.

In the second quarter, Burrow pulled off some magic with a scrambling touchdown pass to Tyler Boyd to make it a 20-6 game. However, an official clearly blew his whistle while the ball was in the air:

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When there's a whistle blown like that in the NFL, even inadvertently, the play is supposed to be dead. However, the play was ruled a touchdown and stayed that way, much to the dismay of Las Vegas.

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After the game, NFL Senior Vice President of Officiating Walt Anderson explained what happened. It doesn't make much sense:

The claim is made here that Boyd caught the ball before the whistle was blown. That's obviously not true. One could make the argument that the whistle had no impact on the ball being caught, because Boyd was relatively open and perhaps the whistle didn't actually impact Tre’von Moehrig's ability to make a play, though it did look like Moehrig slowed up a bit after the whistle.

It was just an unfortunate situation for the Raiders, and this explanation from the NFL doesn't help matters. Las Vegas still had a chance to send the game to overtime or even win in the final moments, but Cincinnati came up with a big interception of Derek Carr to seal the franchise's first playoff victory since the 1990 season.