OK, this one is now officially getting weird.

As the NFL and its 32 teams gets their arms around the new coin toss rule, someone has screwed up the interpretation or application of it.

We contributed to that process earlier today, unfortunately, by reading only some but not all of the Cardinals-Chiefs “Game Book” for the second week of the 2008 preseason.

Per the Game Book (a link to which appears on the right side of this page), the Cardinals won the toss and elected to kick.  The Chiefs opted to defend the East goal.

Per the Game Book, the Chiefs elected to receive to start the third quarter.

But then the play-by-play listed beneath the explanation shows that the Chiefs actually kicked off to the Cardinals.

So we don’t know what the hell happened.  Apparently, the Game Book is wrong.  And, yeah, we made the mistake of assuming that the official documentation of what happened at an NFL game was accurate.

The other possibility is that the Chiefs indeed elected to receive after the Cardinals elected to kick, the Cardinals complained to the officials about it, the officials gave the Cardinals a Mulligan on the coin toss rule since it’s the preseason, and those nuances didn’t appear anywhere in the Game Book.