GREEN BAY — The NFL is hoping to keep Matt LaFleur — and the rest of the league’s head coaches, too, obviously — from having his own I’m-not-in-the-mood-for-drama-tonight moment.

https://t.co/5R6TWzVT7K pic.twitter.com/NIfBLTnfdz

— Jason Wilde (@jasonjwilde) March 18, 2026

In case you’ve forgotten — or scrubbed Lance Easley overstaying his 15 minutes of fame welcome from your memory bank as a Green Bay Packers fan — LaFleur’s predecessor as the Packers head coach, Mike McCarthy, uttered that phrase in the aftermath of the infamous 2012 “Fail Mary” game, which was called by replacement officials the last time the league and the NFL Referee Association couldn’t reach a deal on a contract.

The current deal between the NFL and NFLRA is set to expire on May 31, and the league sent a memo to teams on Wednesday to inform them that it will begin training replacement officials next month and plan on sending those replacement crews on team visits beginning on June 1 if no deal can be reached with the union.

Talks between the NFL and NFLRA are set to continue later this week, the NFL Network reported. The league has asked teams to submit their organized team activity practice schedules and mandatory minicamp schedules to the NFL offices by April 22 so replacement officials can be assigned to those practices starting June 1, the day after the labor deal is set to expire.

The NFL wasn’t as proactive back in 2012, and the Seattle Seahawks’ 14-12 victory over the Packers on that fateful night was the coup de grâce after three tumultuous weeks without the regular officials.

In that game, the Packers were leading the Seahawks, 12-7, with 46 seconds left and the ball on the Green Bay 46-yard line. After a 22-yard completion Russell Wilson-to-Sidney Rice, Wilson threw three consecutive incompletions, leaving the Seahawks facing fourth-and-10 from the Packers’ 24-yard line with 8 seconds showing on the clock.

Wilson dropped back, scrambled to buy time, then heaved a prayer toward the end zone. The Packers had eight defensive backs on the field, and as Wilson’s rainbow came down, five Packers (M.D. Jennings, Charles Woodson, Tramon Williams, Jarrett Bush and Sam Shields) and two Seahawks (wide receivers Golden Tate and Charly Martin) went up, and Jennings appeared to catch it.

Tate, after shoving Shields to the ground from behind, brought his right arm up from beneath Jennings and got his hand on the ball. Back judge Derrick Rhonde-Dunn waved his hands above his head — a signal that didn’t make sense since the play should have been a touchdown (if Tate caught it), a touchback (if Jennings caught it) or an incompletion — before Easley, the side judge, came in from the side and signaled touchdown.

“I’ve never seen anything like that in all my years of football,” McCarthy said after the game.

Packers 14-year veteran center Jeff Saturday said in the visitors’ locker room afterward that he hoped the debacle would lead to the NFLRA and NFL reaching an agreement because of the debacle.

“I hope so. I don’t know why it hasn’t already changed, to be honest with you. I don’t know why we don’t have the guys who know what they’re doing back,” Saturday, a prominent member of the NFL Players Association at the time, said that night. “It’s no disrespect to the guys we have. The game’s just too fast. They can’t keep up. It’s just a sad, sad [thing]. We need the guys who do it every day and get trained year-in and year-out.

“From a player’s perspective, this is [expletive]. You only get 16 guaranteed opportunities, you know? And to have one end like this is frustrating.”

Sure enough, a few days later, the NFL and the NFLRA reached an agreement.

Now, the hope is that it won’t come to a similar situation this time around. But the NFL is clearly stacking sandbags in hopes that this batch of replacement officials will be better if an accord cannot be reached before the start of the season on Sept. 9.

“The negotiations haven’t progressed the way we hoped, from a timing standpoint,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell admitted at the annual NFL Meetings in Phoenix last week. “We obviously have obligations to our fans, to everybody in the National Football League, to play, and we will be prepared to play.

“So, we are taking appropriate steps to be ready, but we’re also keenly focused on negotiations. So we’d like to get a negotiated deal, and we certainly are focused on that.”

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