How a Monday Night Football mishap may have exposed deep problems with Google Search

For nearly as long as the internet has been around, there's a particular rhythm for any curious person with a WiFi connection. You have a question, you Google it, you get an answer. But a mishap during this week's Monday Night Football and the NFL's onside kick rules has show just how unreliable Google can be these days — and how the search giant can help spread misinformation.

The confusion was sparked by an unfortunate turn of events. During the waning moments of the MNF matchup the Baltimore Ravens and Tampa Bay Buccaneers — one of two ESPN games last evening — Bucs star receiver Chris Godwin suffered a gruesome injury with his team trailing by 10 points. Fans wondered why such a star player was on the field at all at when the team was down by two scores with less than a minute remaining in the game.

"We're just trying to win the ballgame," Tampa head coach Todd Bowles told reporters. "We're still down 10, trying to get extra points, kick another onside kick. It just happened."

That quote, in part, sparked the confusion. You see, the NFL revamped its kickoff before this season and changed, well, everything, including the rules for onside kicks. Surprise onside kicks were effectively banned, for instance, because the new "dynamic" kickoff requires the kicking team to declare to the refs they're trying an onside kick. Amid all these changes — and the NFL's penchant for making rules complicated — it tracks that confusion might arise.

Crucially, at one point there was a proposed rule change limiting how many onside kicks a team could attempt. The rule was not adopted — trailing teams can attempt unlimited onside kicks in the fourth quarter — but it did appear in an article in Sporting News that was ultimately corrected. But lots of folks online were under the false impression that, actually, the Bucs had exhausted their onside kick chances and left Godwin in the game despite that fact.

To recap: Viewers reasonably thought the Buccaneers were putting a star player's health at risk in a hopeless situation, all because they mistakenly believed teams had a limited number of attempts to regain possession. In reality, NFL rules allow the Buccaneers to keep trying late-game kicks aimed at recovering the control of the ball. None of this is easy to understand, but it looks like Google may have made matters worse.

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Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

In fact, Google could actually be to blame for all the confusion among viewers. For some reason, Google searches on Monday night resulted in faulty information. After seeing the confusion while watching the game, I searched the rules for myself. Google spat out a clipped answer at the top of the search, citing the corrected Sporting News article, with the wrong information that a team was limited to two onside kicks per game. It's not clear when, exactly, Sporting News made its correction, so it's possible Google was slow in simply catching up to a correction made by the outlet. But Google showed me an answer no longer present in the article itself.

But Google's AI-powered search — a quite controversial feature — got it wrong as well. Its AI overview told me an NFL team was limited to one onside kick per game. It's almost funny to not only get the information wrong, but to get it wrong with two different incorrect answers — though it appears the AI overview was different for other users.

Mashable reached out to Google for comment and will update the story if and when we receive a response.

While this situation is relatively low stakes, it is a frightening representation of how quickly misinformation spreads online — especially with Google's aid. Things move fast. It's not just random people who get tripped up. For instance, a respected sports publication like Awful Announcing shared the wrong information, which, of course, would confuse more folks scrolling.

It's not hard to imagine the person running Awful Announcing's X account doing a quick Google, getting fed false info, then posting it. Ultimately Awful Announcing's post was corrected — as were Google's results — but the misinformation had already been spread.

Seasoned NFL reporters and even the guy who invented the new kind of kickoff were getting mixed up.

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Granted, it does not help that the NFL has a way of making a terribly complicated rulebook. That opens avenues for human errors that trickle their way into Google's results.

But do you know what else is complicated and ripe for human errors and fabrication? Politics. International conflict. Climate change. What happens when the familiar muscle memory of Googling can no longer be trusted?

As Mashable has covered in detail, Google search has run into numerous problems lately. The internet is flooded with low-quality content looking to answer common search queries. Court documents and reporting have suggested that perhaps Google has become more focused on ad dollars than reliable search results. And, let's not forget, AI search overview's rollout got a pretty disastrous response from the public. In total, it stands to reason that folks should double check anything they Google.

So yes, the rules of an NFL game aren't terribly important in the grand scheme of things. But the ease with which bad information can spread via Google is much bigger than anything that happened between the Bucs and Ravens.