Quotes

Life is short, break the rules. Forgive quickly, kiss slowly. Love truly, laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile. - Samuel Longhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)

Monday, September 24, 2012

Time to Boycott the NFL - Just say no to replacement officisals

I was willing to deal with replacement refs for this season, until tonight. Now I freely admit that I am a die hard Packer Fan. But after the game tonight in which the replacement referees decided that Seattle would win the game I'm now boycotting the NFL till the an agreement is made with the regular refs and they are back on the field. I will continue to play fantasy football but only because that's a commitment I made to our league.

The killing drive started off with a roughing the passer penalty that called back a Green Bay interception. I'm still trying to figure out how in the world that hit, with both players falling to the ground could in any way be called roughing the passer. At the very least the Packers would have kicked a field goal which would have made this a two score game. This drive included a "defensive pass interference" call in which the offensive player literally climbed over the defending Packer, including a face mask to get to the ball. The Packers held and got the ball on downs, but had to punt the ball away after a couple of major screw ups.

Packers are holding and the game ends with a Hail Mary pass that is intercepted in the end zone and yet the Seahawks are awarded the game winning touchdown. Some how one offensive hand on the ball cradled against the defender's chest with two hands is a tie ball. Of course the offensive pass interference is not called when the same receiver (Tate) pushes the Packer in front of him down.

Feel free to respond, I'm sure that everyone saw this a bit differently but the announcers are definitely on my side on this one. 

So that's it I'm done watching football till the refs are back. The NFL has the commodity and bad refs yet everyone is watching anyway. Quite frankly as Steve Young pointed out last week, the NFL does not care about the product on the field this season, The stadiums are still full and they are making their money. This is the only thing that I can do, granted it won't make a bit of difference but it makes me feel a little better. 

4 comments:

  1. Tonight's game pretty much proved that there's no difference between the replacement officials and the regular officials. The unnecessary roughness penalty that extended the game was at least as bad as anything in the Packers game.

    The only difference between the games was that the announcers had a different storyline in mind for tonight's game than for Monday night's game.

    The replacement refs made slightly different categories of mistakes in games (more mistakes on rules and fewer on judgement calls), but on average, I'd say that they made about as many significant errors as the regulars. My intuition is that one set of union tools was supporting another set of union tools, but it's certainly possible that the announcers were just incompetent, not corrupt.

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    1. First I didn't watch the entire game and drifted away sometime during the 3rd quarter. There were penalties called, I didn't see anything to amiss with any of the ones I saw called. The were no fights, the game flowed smoothly. From what I have read online at this point (granted all that must be taken with a grain of salt) the unnecessary roughness call was appropriate for action taken after the whistle was blown. I guess we will have to disagree on this one. Remember in the Packers game it wasn't a single call, it was three calls; roughing the passer when both players were falling to the ground which overturned an interception, a defensive pass interference call that should have been offensive pass interference and would have had Seattle punt the ball away, an interception in the endzone on the last play that was ruled a simultaneous catch and awarded to the offensive player (correct interpretation of the rule if it had been a simultaneous catch) which wasn't simultaneous at all (there is a great still shot of this catch from behind and there is only one pair of hands on the ball and they belong to Jennings) and the not calling the offensive pass interference when Tate pushed down the Packer DB (Shields I believe) that was standing in front of him. Give me the real refs, they are far better than the replacements were.

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