Officially a Disaster (Pun Fully Intended)

 Full column on the official situation. I'll have a post Friday or Saturday on the actual football in Week 3, which was awesome, and looking forward to Week 4.

I’ll keep it brief about this (Editor's Note: I wasn't) , because everyone, up to and including the President of the United States, has weighed in on the NFL officiating lockout.  And much like last year’s player lockout, I found much of the rhetoric from people who don’t understand the situation to be maddening. Last year it was “This is just a bunch of millionaires against billionaires.” This year doesn’t have quite the same catchy phrase, but the standard throw away joke was that “The Real Refs Weren’t Too Great Either.” And for a while, that’s kind of how I felt. They were bad in preseason, but no one really thought they wouldn’t have a deal done by Week 1. Then the first week came and passed without a huge incident (Seattle got an extra timeout that didn’t impact the game- and it was a weird situation I honestly didn’t know the rule to) and I thought maybe we’d be OK. But the last few weeks, compounded by a hugely egregious mistake last night, have bought us to the point of no return.

 They are making two different calls, but right here it looks they're doing the YMCA.

Look, I’ve said all along I didn’t care about them missing holding or pass interference. That’s judgment call stuff that the regular officials don’t necessarily call consistently all the time. My problem all along has been with the administration of the game. In the first preseason game I watched, the Giants were given an extra play to end the game, when a penalty should have resulted in a 10-second run-off.  It was the first preseason game and they ended up getting sacked anyway, so it didn’t mean anything at the time, but that kind of concerned me from the start. Because that’s not a thing you get better at with practice: that’s a black and white application of the rule.

But nothing happened the first 47 games of the season that directly impacted the outcome of a game in the closing seconds.  That all ended last night. For those of you who didn’t get to see it, here’s the video, starting at about the 25 second mark:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSdKk_YML3k&feature=fvwrel

OK, that wasn’t the actual clip (like anyone hasn’t seen it already yet). But it’s a pretty damn spot on representation of what happened. Hail Mary into the end zone, two guys go up, both come down.* Joint possession is ruled, which goes to the Offense by rule. Touchdown Seattle, game over. If they overturn it, Interception, Green Bay, Game over. This was the nightmare scenario for the refs and the NFL: there was no safe way out. If one of the options would have sent the game to Overtime, or extended the game, you can bet your ass they would have made that ruling upon review. In this case, I think they just went with the home team.

*I don’t even consider the fact that Golden Tate pushed off. Everyone pushes off on those plays. You’re not getting that call there, let’s just leave that part out of it.

 I miss Mike Carey. He always looks like he's doing half of The Rock's People's Elbow signal. Plus he was the ref for Super Bowl 42.

 

For the record, I actually don’t think the call was that horrendously egregious. That’s a killer situation, and one of the vaguest areas of the rulebook concerns joint possession. Because technically Tate did have his hand on the ball the whole way. Does that equal possession? Certainly MD Jennings had “more possession,” but is that even a thing? Obviously, I believe the call should have been overturned on review, but my point is this wasn’t some case of outright corruption, or even the worst call I can remember. That would be this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrhRZ0EcpRs

What it is, however, is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Before you had people sort of working around the edges of this thing. Now, players, coaches, and even broadcasters usually very loyal to the NFL are openly criticizing them DURING games. The tipping point for all sports scandals is when politicians get involved. Today, President Obama, VP Candidate Paul Ryan, the Governor of Wisconsin, and Newt Gingrich all weighed on this, and ham-fistedly tried to work it into their ongoing agendas. The New Jersey State Legislature announced they are considering a bill banning all NFL games in their state with replacement refs, citing sub-standard working conditions. Obviously that’s grandstanding,  likely illegal and would never pass, but I say if it puts the Giants in Yankee Stadium and the Jets somewhere in Southeast Asia, I’d be fine with it for a while.

But people are so off base on assigning blame in this instance, and that’s what frustrates me. It’s not at all these guys trying their best as replacement refs. They’re mostly High School and small-College refs. If this were SEC officials, I doubt the drop-off would be that severe. If we played 3 on 3 basketball, and you told me to stick the 22 year old starting point guard for his college team, you couldn’t get pissed at me when I couldn’t cover him. He’s just too fast. 

People also don’t know what they are talking about when they blame Roger Goddell. The Commissioner of the NFL works for the owners. On financial matters, he does their bidding. They want him to take a hard-line, so he does. I’m not crazy about a lot of his ideas, but in this instance, if the majority of owners wanted a deal done with the officials, it’d be done.  So the owners have to shoulder a bit of blame here. They can easily afford to pay what these guys want, with almost no noticeable impact on their finances.

But I have to be honest, the officials (the real, locked-out ones) deserve a lot of blame here too. The big issue is the pension. The NFL wants to do away with the non-contributory pensions they give the NFL officials, who makes over 100,000 dollars a year as part time employees. A few things, if you make over 100 grand a year at something, that means you don’t need another job, so you’re really not a part time employee. You may not get health benefits, but a job you make a 100,000 dollars a year to work a few days a week, half the year is a GOOD job, not a part-time job. Secondly, who the hell has a non-contributory pension nowadays? It’s not something companies, even those who print money, are going to be able to afford to do much longer. The NFL even said they would honor the existing pensions, and stop offering them to all new officials. That’s a pretty generous bargaining move.

The other, smaller, issues are as follows: The NFL wants to increase the number of crews, so that crews that consistently earn low grades can be “benched” in favor of higher-performers. They want to make some officials full-time, and add the number of officials they employ. This would admittedly divide the wage pool, forcing most officials to make less annually. That’s definitely a legitimate gripe, but what the NFL asking here is far less than what they made the players swallow last year. Not a perfect comparison, but still one worth looking at.

 This is where I watch football every week. Essentially my Crack Den. Also one of the few moments when Mook is not sticking his head in my lap, trying to steal pretzels or pizza crusts.

 

But the final finger gets pointed back to all of us. Because we put up with it. We are all so addicted to the NFL, that we let them get away with basically anything. The PSL is one of the most blatant “fuck you” moves to fans in general that I’ve ever seen. The lockout last year exposed the avarice of the men who run this sport, far surpassing even the owners of other sports. Why do they do it? Because they can. Because unlike every other sport, the NFL becomes incorporated into people’s lifestyles during the 5 months it’s on. It’s perfectly acceptable to watch 9 hours of football every Sunday, but with the exception of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament, you can’t do that with any other sport. Between fantasy leagues, picks pools, suicide pools, and the games themselves, most of the guys I know have a large portion of their social lives devoted to football from September to January. And we’re not going to give that up over a labor dispute with the officials. So they’ll settle this, re-establish equilibrium, and then 18 months from now, some other nonsense will pop up (my guess is a serious push towards  an international franchise). We’ll all piss and moan, but like many people in a one-sided relationship, we’ll keep coming back, because we know they love us, they just have a funny way of showing it.