Did we miss something? Did the replacement refs slip back on the field this past week?
When Dean Blandino is being quoted everywhere, you know it wasn’t a good week for the men in stripes. It’s been hard for Blandino to stay under the radar lately. He’s the NFL vice president of officiating and he has been busy sifting through everything from Mike Tomlin’s un-flagged wandering to the chain gang snafu at FedEx Field to the 15 plays cranky Cardinals coach Bruce Arians sent him for review.
None of those cost a team a game. In the case of the last two games, they just cost a team an opportunity to win.
“They make a mistake and you live with it,” shrugged Redskins coach Mike Shanahan, who then pointed out that a face mask could have been called against the Giants when Will Hill stripped Pierre Garcon of the ball.
So much for living with it.
Shanahan’s reaction is instructive, though. Yes, the officials erred terribly, just as Tomlin should have been penalized, if anything by the official who had to run around him up the sidelines. But there is also much that is going to be missed. It happens in every game. Consider how many calls are overturned by review. It would probably be the same ratio with penalties, at best.
The replacement ref fiasco proved how much better the real guys are but it is still the hardest of any sport to officiate. Everything happens so fast. They have to make decisions in real time on plays that are hard enough to decipher in slow motion. On top of that is a complicated rule book that makes the Affordable Care Act easy reading. With all the new rules emphasizing player safety, there is a tendency to call anything close so there are too many shades of gray up for interpretation. It’s overwhelming.
In the case of Cardinals-Eagles, the problem was inconsistency. Both the Cardinals and Eagles were victimized by 50-50 calls but the ones that hurt the Cardinals occurred down the stretch. Two were incidental defensive holding that occurred away from the play, one that wiped out what would have been Nick Foles’ first interception of the year, the other that allowed the Eagles to run out the clock.
While those were made, there were two non-calls involving more contact that could have gone against the Eagles. They were letting them play on the outside and calling everything on the inside.
Arians went nuts and had something to say the crew after the game before he picked out his 15 questionable plays.
“I’ve already gotten most of the answers. I got them before I left the locker room yesterday,” he told the Phoenix media with elaborating the next day.
Asked if he got gave him any satisfaction, he said: “No. I just get madder.”
Meanwhile, Arians instructed his team to move on. And, in this case, the victors felt Arians was a spoiled sport.
“Man, let’s not be crybabies,” said Eagles cornerback Cary Williams, who felt there was nothing blatant to complain about. “I don’t know, man. I thought the refs kept them in the game to some degree, at times. But it’s about football man. It’s about going out there, executing.
“If they came in here with a different attitude, maybe not so nonchalant maybe, thinking it was going to be a cakewalk, maybe . . . I don’t know. I’m not big on teams sending stuff in and, ‘This is what needs to be called.’ Man, play the game, dude. It’s football, man. Don’t blame it on the refs. Blame it on your preparation that week.”
He’s right. It’s football, or at least the modern version of it. And it’s harder to officiate than ever.
