The NFL backed its replacement officials Tuesday on the Seattle Seahawks’ controversial touchdown catch Monday night, announcing that it would not overturn the outcome of the team’s last-second win over the Green Bay Packers. But it said the officials botched a call on the same play that would have ended the game with a victory by the Packers.

In a written statement, the league said it agreed with the decision by an on-field replacement referee that there was “no indisputable visual evidence” to reverse the ruling that Seahawks wide receiver Golden Tate and Packers safety M.D. Jennings caught the ball simultaneously.

The play almost immediately intensified calls for the NFL to put its regular officials back on the field. Replacement officials have worked the first three weeks of NFL games, with the members of the NFL Referees Association locked out by the league in a labor dispute.

The league did say the game-winning touchdown should have been nullified by an offensive pass interference penalty on Tate for pushing Green Bay defensive back Sam Shields prior to the catch. A flag for that infraction would have ended the game. But the failure of replacement officials to make that call is not reviewable and the result of the game will stand, the league said in its statement.

One person familiar with the negotiations said Monday, before the controversy in Seattle, that a deal was unlikely this week but could be within reach next week. But even that was uncertain, the person said.

A former NFL front-office executive said Tuesday he remained skeptical that the public outcry over the missed call Monday night would lead the NFL to make major concessions in the negotiations with the locked-out referees to get them back on the field.

“They are a reactive group,” the former executive said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. “They do react to what’s on the [television] networks, what’s in the newspapers. But with money, they can dig in. They consider this group they’re dealing with [the referees] to be unreasonable. I don’t think they’ll cave in. They’ll compromise, but they won’t cave in.”

One person familiar with the league’s deliberations over the catch said there is no mechanism that would enable the league to reverse the call by replacement officials that gave the Seahawks the victory. The NFL’s rule book says that teams cannot protest the outcome of a game.

The rule book does give NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell the authority to reverse a game’s result or order it replayed from any point if an “extraordinary act” has occurred.

But the rule book appears to limit the commissioner’s authority to take such a step to “any club action, non-participant interference, or calamity [that] occurs in an NFL game which he deems so extraordinarily unfair or outside the accepted tactics encountered in professional football that such action has a major effect on the result of the game.”

The rule book says the commissioner “will not apply his authority in cases of complaints by clubs concerning judgmental errors or routine errors of omission by game officials. Games involving such complaints will continue to stand as completed.”