Free to Speak Your Mind

The NFL is a dictatorship where owners picked a stooge that enforces rules that make no
sense. A player or coach calls out the officials for blowing the call and they get fined by the stooge in a three-piece suit. Clay Mathews is the latest player to get fined for telling the truth and that truth is that the officials make too many bad calls in games and there is no way to change the bad call.

The officiating in the NFL has always been on the borderline of amateurish and useless. This year the media seems to be gun-ho on promoting news stories that highlight the horrible officiating. The stories are years in the making.

It was just last year that the NFL decided it was going to enforce the roughing the quarterback rule that it didn't enforce in past years because too many quarterbacks were getting hurt. That went over so well that after a few games last year that they stopped calling it and it got to the point that at the end of the season it seemed like nothing was being called when it came to roughing the quarterback.

This year's gaffe is the desire to replay pass interference. The idea seems like the right thing to do because it is an important part of the game. The receiver pushes off and makes a great catch or a defender interferes and the official doesn't make the call, well, good news for everyone because the play can be replayed and the error corrected. Too bad that isn't the case, not even close. This year's games are full of examples of textbook pass interference that don't get overturned.

The hope with replaying pass interference is to avoid the blunder from last year's NFC's championship game that had a play that looked like pass interference but it was never called, so the NFL did what it is always done and that is it changed the rules to avoid the public relations nightmare that comes from hiring bumbling officials that can't keep up with the speed of the game.

The game is so fast and there are so many no calls or games where the refs only seem to make calls when a team is close to scoring. The Cowboys got walked down the field last weekend with the aid of the officials, but when the defensive player tackled Jason Witten before the ball was thrown on the two-point conversion attempt, well, the hankies didn't fly.

Whatever you do, please, don't question the poor officiating because the NFL won't do anything to change it. The fact is they don't care if their product is questionable and becoming a waste of time because they continue to hire officials fresh from the local senior center in town. Sure, it is age discrimination to say the officials are too old to be on the field, but the players move so fast that it is wrong to put officials on the field that can't run. These older officials should be in the booth offering assistance from up above to avoid some of these bad calls being made by old officials not being in a position to make the correct call.

It is unrealistic to get rid of all the bad calls, but at this pace, the game will look more like a professional wrestling match than an NFL game. 

But don't speak ill of the NFL because it is going to cost you a little bit of money. The truth is never free when it comes to the NFL.