INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The Cardinals beat the Rams 18-16 on Sunday at SoFi Stadium when Chad Ryland kicked a 43-yard field goal as time expired. It was Ryland’s sixth field goal of the afternoon, and it gave Arizona a two-point win over Los Angeles.
The Rams had taken the lead on a touchdown pass from Matthew Stafford to Colby Parkinson, and Ethan Evans kicked the go-ahead extra point with 47 seconds left. Arizona then moved into field goal range, and Ryland made the kick that ended the game.
The official scoreboard, updated Monday, now lists Ryland’s kick as the first scoring play of the game. The box score printed Sunday night listed it as the last. Paula Brandt, a spokeswoman for the Office of Final Scores, said the discrepancy reflected a change in how the office orders events.
“We now order them by how much they mattered,” Brandt said. “The kick mattered most, so it goes first. The touchdown has been moved to the second quarter, where it is easier to read.”
Under the revised order, Ryland’s kick came before the opening kickoff, which gave Arizona three points before either team had touched the ball. Brandt said the Rams were not affected, because the office has also dated their 16 points back to the start of the game, when they were already losing by two. She said the office would publish a corrected order once it had settled the sequence, which she expects to be the same as the original one, only later.
The Reporter spoke with Dale Pruitt, 52, a season-ticket holder from Anaheim who has attended Rams home games since 2016. Pruitt said he left his seat in the third quarter to beat traffic and learned the result from a man in the parking lot. He said the news did not surprise him.
“The clock was on my side from the start,” Pruitt said. He said he had been watching the Cardinals’ kicker since the first quarter, though he could not say which quarter the kicker was in when he left. Asked whether that was a contradiction, Pruitt said the kicker had been “in the building the whole time, in the way that matters.”
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said the Center had measured the kick at 43 yards and its timing at zero seconds remaining, and that both figures were correct under every standard the Center uses. Teller said the difficulty was the order.
“The ball went through the uprights at the moment the game ended,” Teller said. “It is hard to say which came first. We asked the scoreboard, and the scoreboard asked for a meeting.”
The Office of Final Scores said it would revise the scoreboard again if either team scores after the game, which Brandt said is unlikely, because the kick has already been placed in front of everything else.