NFL History | Trans World Dome, St. Louis — The Reversal Stood and the Sentence It Rested On Did Not

Tampa Bay trailed 11 to 6 with under a minute left, and the Buccaneers had a completion.

Shaun King threw to Bert Emanuel, who came down with the ball; WFTS in Tampa reports the catch would have placed it at the St. Louis 23-yard line. The officials on the field signalled a catch. The play went to review and the ruling was reversed, because the point of the ball had touched the ground while Emanuel held it, and a ball touching the ground made a pass incomplete under the rule the 1999 season was played by. The possession ended there.

Pro Football Reference's box score for 23 January 2000 gives the venue as the Trans World Dome, the crowd as 66,496, and the quarters, Tampa Bay first, as 3-3, 3-5, 6-5 and 6-11. Tampa Bay led after three. The box score does not record the down or the length of the throw, and published accounts differ on both: the Tampa Bay Times described a thirteen-yard reception, the Green Bay Press-Gazette a fourth-down throw in the last minute. What none of them disputes is the reason given for the reversal.

That is the argument for pinning this game here rather than filing it as a grievance. Nothing was found wrong with the review. What the league amended in the following offseason was the definition of a catch. The Green Bay Press-Gazette summarised the old rule as forbidding contact between the ball and the ground during the catching process, and the amended one as allowing the ball to touch the ground provided the ground did not help the receiver gain possession. WFTS reports the same change, and both outlets, writing sixteen and seventeen years later, still called it by the receiver's name. The reversal stood; the sentence it rested on did not.

The machinery was younger than the rule it enforced. Football Zebras counts this play among the early credibility tests of the replay system, and WFTS dates the restoration of replay to the 1999 season, the first since 1992. A review process one season old read a sentence in the rulebook, applied it to a play that sentence answered plainly, and it was the sentence that gave way.

The building is a stadium attached to a convention centre. Its operator describes that physical connection to the rest of the America's Center complex as what allows the floor to be changed between exhibition hall and playing field, a sentence about trade shows that also explains why, in April 2021, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was able to run a community vaccination centre inside it. The box score calls the building the Trans World Dome; as of September 2026 the operator's own site calls it The Dome at America's Center.

Coordinates. The pin is a street point, not a footprint. The Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder matches 701 Convention Plaza, the address the operator publishes, to 38.631904, -90.189888, interpolated along an address range of 691 to 799. A second query on the same street, at 801 Convention Plaza, returns 38.632446, -90.192241, about 215 metres west along the same block face, which is the signature of an interpolated road point rather than a building point. No independent second method was reachable for this entry: the City of St. Louis publishes no Socrata catalogue at the usual endpoint, the Missouri state portal holds no address-point layer, and the OpenStreetMap geocoders are refused to this tool. The coordinate is therefore single-method, sits on Convention Plaza in front of the dome rather than on it, and is given a precision radius of 250 metres so that the footprint falls inside it.

Cover. Two United States Navy sailors directing arrivals at the federally run community vaccination centre inside the building, 6 April 2021, photographed by Steven Zumwalt for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and distributed through DVIDS as a work of the United States government, VIRIN 210406-O-SZ823-095. It is not a photograph of the game. It shows the lower concourse, with the building's own signs for sections 101 to 102 and 153 in frame, twenty-one years after the play this entry is about.