Late in Thursday night’s game between the Rams and Vikings, there was an obvious missed facemask call on Byron Young’s pocket for a safety on Sam Darnold, effectively ending the game.

But neither head coach Kevin O’Connell nor quarterback Sam Darnold made much of an offense that, if whistled, would have kept Minnesota in possession.

“You know, it looked like he had quite a few face masks in there. I’m not going to call or not call and stuff like that,” O’Connell said. “It’s just – I told our team, the officials and all that stuff, that we need to talk about that, we need to take comfort in that, this is not the way we’re going to respond to this. It’s just not going to happen. And I’m going to do the same now.

“I actually have no comment on whether it was a penalty. It looked like he got a piece of the face mask, but they didn’t think so, so they didn’t throw the flag.”

Darnold noted that the team had not put itself in the best position before eliminating him for safety reasons.

“The face mask – it is what it is,” Darnold said. “I thought we could have done a lot to not put ourselves in the situation we were in, the punishment for that. So we just have to keep playing better and not put ourselves in that situation.”

After that play, the Rams executed a high safety and ran out the clock with three knees from quarterback Matthew Stafford.

Had the foul been executed properly when Darnold was taken down, the Vikings would have been on their own 20-yard line, down eight, with 1:36 on the clock.