After Further Review: NFL Officials should be flagged for Game Misconduct

After this weekend’s disastrous and embarrassing officiating display, I planned on using this space to catalogue all of the weekend’s erroneous calls, but awoke Monday to find that someone else – Kevin Hench at FoxSports.com – had beaten me to it. Check out Hench’s summary of the atrocious rulings from this weekend:

http://foxsports.foxnews.com/nfl/story/5251620

The league even issued an apology to Pittsburgh for overturning Troy Polamalu’s interception. While Hench included most of the mistakes by the zebras, he excluded one of the most staggering and revealing.

In the second half, with the Patriots driving the ball deep into Denver territory (yet again), linebacker Al Wilson began to walk to the sideline for a substitution out of confusion and exhaustion as New England went to quickly hike the ball. A whistle quickly sounded and play was stopped for Wilson, who was apparently deemed an injured player, and thus the stoppage of play. Wilson slumped to the ground and lifted his helmet in complete fatigue. But when the clock was restarted, after Wilson and the Broncos defense was allowed a nice rest period to regroup, the Broncos were NOT charged with a timeout.

The NFL rules on the NFL.com website state, “The Referee will allow necessary time to attend to an injured player, or repair a legal player’s equipment.”

It doesn’t say anything about an official stopping the game because he notices a defensive player, on a struggling defense, is a little tired.

A play like that doesn’t prove some vast conspiracy theory (what would that be anyway, that the league finds it boring to have a dynasty?), but it does illustrate how lost and incompetent the officiating crews can be in a hostile environment. When they show the play clock in the corner of the screen and it’s violently shaking up and down from the noise, apparently, that’s what the game looks like through the eyes of the officials.

So when the closest call of the weekend was determined - Champ Bailey‘s goaline fumble – no wonder the zebras ruled in favor of the home team both on the field and on replay. On CBS, Phil Simms suggested using logic – a four letter word in NFL officiating circles – to determine if the ball traveled over the pylon by seeing where it was fumbled and where it landed. But the NFL doesn’t apply logic; they use “indisputable visual evidence.”

. After carefully studying multiple frames and camera shots of the fumble, we can deduce – through logic, intuition, trigonometry, and plain eyesight – that the ball had to have passed over at least part of the pylon, which is a touchback. The only way the ball could have gone out at the 1 yard line – where it was spotted and subsequently upheld, Polamalu style – was if Bailey fumbled at around the 3, and the ball jettisoned out at an angle greater than 45 degrees (the ball was in his right hand). With replay – yes replay – it’s easy to see that’s not even close to what happened. The ball would have to travel at a near 90 degree angle, through or over Bailey’s body, for it to be placed where it was. Don’t forget, an NFL football is 12 inches long – one-third of a yard – and only a micro-fraction of the ball has to pass over the pylon for it to be a touchback.

I’m throwing my red flag: the NFL desperately needs to climb under the hood and review its replay system.

The Replay System

What’s even more vexing is that on Sunday, in Chicago, a similar play occurred, only this time the officials (specifically the two referees who were within a few yards of the play) ruled in the exact opposite manner of the Bailey fumble, even though the call they made was physically impossible given what happened. Not surprisingly, the call was a touchdown in favor of the home team, Chicago.

Thomas Jones was headed for the corner of the endzone when he was hit out of bounds. He dove and fumbled/threw the ball toward the orange marker as he extended his arm. Jones lost the ball at around the one and a half yard line, and the pigskin knocked over the pylon. After conferring, the officials deemed the play a touchdown. This, of course, is a touchback, and it’s impossible to have a touchdown when the ball hits the pylon, and the player who last possessed the ball is over 3 feet from the pylon. Thankfully, the play was reviewed and correctly ruled a touchback, but in all likelihood if the ball didn’t crash into the marker, it would have been ruled out of bounds and suffered the same fate as the call the day before. Apparently, indisputable visual evidence for a touchback must constitute the ball actually hitting the pylon, unless of course Troy Polamalu is involved.

These are events that everyone sitting at home can easily see, and replays only confirm what their eyes original conveyed to them. A friend of mine was watching the game with two Broncos fans, who both thought in real-time and on replay that the Bailey fumble was a touchback. So why couldn’t seven trained professionals whose only function is to correctly enforce such rules see the same thing, with the benefit of replay?

This has been a recurring theme in the NFL all season, and it’s embarrassing for a multi-trillion industry with so much technology at its fingertips to have such a poor replay system. The red flags. Losing a timeout. Going under the hood. Acts common to the game. It all sounds like an amusing children’s playground game.

Tampa Bay was essentially awarded not one, but two victories this year. On the last play of an early season game against the Lions, Roy Williams clearly caught a touchdown pass sliding out of the endzone. After looking at the replay, officials ruled it incomplete. Why? Possibly the three-and-a-half hours of running around, and listening to insane Tampa fans scream and heckle as they squinted at a field-side monitor for 90 seconds probably had something to do with it. History repeated itself a few weeks later against Washington, as Mike Alstott fell short of the endzone going for a winning 2 point conversion, but because you could only see his arm fall short of the goaline, and not the actual ball, the officials upheld the call on replay, even though the same replay confirmed that Alstott had the ball in his left hand, before the view of the ball was obstructed by other players, and that same left arm clanked down short of the goaline when he was tackled.

Since it’s so easy for fans and broadcasters to see a play, with the benefit of multiple vantage points and replays, why can’t the NFL adopt a replay system that is just as simple? Everything should be reviewable – penalties included – since the entire point of replay is to enforce the rules correctly. Dispose of the long delay to review plays on the field, and hire two or three replay officials to watch the game in the both, utilizing both the TV angle of a play and the live view looking down on the field. Quarterbacks have audio feeds in their helmets to communicate with coaches; the officials on the field should have earpieces so they can be in constant communication with the replay officials. With this system in place, it would have taken no more than 30 seconds – less the length of the play clock – for the replay official to tell the head referee that Asante Samuel didn’t interfere with Ashley Lelie, and that there was a false start on the Bronco field goal. Why force a disoriented tired middle-aged man to hastily look at a close play when a rested and relaxed individual could perform the same task in the confines of a box in a leather chair?

Patriot Games

Tuesday morning on his ESPNradio show, Dan Patrick wondered in amazement, “what if Pittsburgh had lost to Indianapolis this weekend because of that interception call?”

Patrick was referring to the Troy Polamalu interception late in the game that seemingly clinched the victory for Pittsburgh, only to have the call overturned in the most mind-boggling, “what-film-did-he-watch” reversal in NFL history. Patrick resurrected a World War II era game between Dartmouth and Cornell, where Cornell forfeited a win after discovering they won the game on a fifth down touchdown pass.

So, would Indianapolis have forfeited the win? As Mike Wilbon observed on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” “If Pittsburgh had lost because of that call, it would have been unthinkable.” What would have happened?

Well, it did happen. Only the travesty transpired on Saturday night, not Sunday morning.

And the NFL hasn’t even acknowledged it.

As Mike Greenberg bombastically declared, “I hate the Patriots, but they got the game absolutely ripped away from them by the officials.”

The same pundits who wonder what would have been done if Pittsburgh had lost because of that one key call against them on Sunday, must have been sleeping on Saturday night, when the Patriots had at least three huge calls, resulting in 17 direct points, decide the game.

Yet there are still those who say that if Pittsburgh had lost it would have been by their own doing, after all, Jerome Bettis fumbled and they let the Colts drive down the field. They say the Patriots loss had nothing to do with the officiating because the Pats turned the ball over five times and the unflappable Adam Vinatieri missed a key field goal. There are two serious flaws in that logic:

1. Denver was handed 17 points in a game where they scored 27. That’s 63% of their offense from bogus officiating, which is unheard of in any sport. Could you imagine one bad foul call resulting in 63 free throws in an NBA finals game? Or a single hooking call resulting in four consecutive penalty shots in the Stanley Cup Finals? Most fans will blame a single controversial call (i.e. USA-USSR in basketball at the 72’ Olympics, the Polamalu interception) and understand that if the game was close, it can be decided by a single call. An Ivy League school like Cornell forfeits games based on one faulty ruling. This game had three horrendous calls directly resulting in 63% of the team’s scoring.

Let’s say a presidential candidate campaigned and campaigned until he had the vote of 63% of the country. Due to poor ballot “officiating,” he lost 15% his vote, and thus lost the election. Would we then place the blame on the candidate for not securing more votes, or would the election be described as “rigged,” “fixed,” and “stolen?” Elections have been contested in the Supreme Court over a discrepancy of les than one percent.

2. Yes, the Patriots hurt themselves with some horribly uncharacteristic errors, but most of those mistakes occurred after the calls, and complimentary Denver points, started piling up against them. It’s impossible to overlook the chronology of these events. They were in a hostile environment, against a good team, in a game they knew was difficult, and every step they took up the mountain an official in stripes shoved them back down. New England only had one turnover before the phantom pass interference call. That call changed the momentum of the game, as Denver had absolutely nothing going offensively, and was handed 7 points. The Pats then fumbled a kickoff that shouldn’t have occurred, and it most likely should have resulted in a punt (after an offsides on the field goal was ignored). Their two final turnovers were a direct result of desperation because of the score: Troy Brown had to hurry back to fair catch a ball after a feigned punt block, and Tom Brady forced a 60 yard pass because the Patriots were running out of clock.

Even after all of what happened, and the mistakes New England made, could you imagine how absolutely broken Denver would have been if the Pats had been awarded the ball at the 20 yard line after the Champ Bailey fumble? The Denver defense was exhausted, and the Pats were moving the ball well, while Denver had done little offensively. From Asante Samuel’s interception to Champ Bailey’s interception, New England had thoroughly dominated the Broncos, out gaining them in yardage 259 to 61. It would have remained 10-6, and would have given New England new life, after what seemed like a backbreaker. Ben Watson would have been an instant legend on that Patriots sideline, and the collective mood wouldn’t have been “we a dodged bullet,” but “we dodged Little Boy and Fat Man.”

Just how much does the game change when a call is made correctly? After the Asante Samuels interception was correctly overturned (it was mysteriously ruled incomplete by an official staring right at him 5 yards away), the New England offense, which had been dormant, exploded. The Denver offense, which had started to move the ball, stopped. For the ensuing two quarters, New England absolutely destroyed Denver (sans bad calls and turnovers), racking up 357 yards to 77. 357 yards in two quarters of football is a thrashing of epic proportions. Apologies to the Broncos, who are a formidable team, but there was little doubt that the better team lost on Saturday.

Yet the majority of the officiating criticism has been directed toward one call in Indianapolis that almost cost Pittsburgh the game, but didn’t. The phony game that Denver had handed to them has seemingly been overlooked, and we will forever be left wondering “what if” about the Patriots opportunity to win an unprecedented third consecutive championship. Patriot fans have been awaiting a loss in the playoffs for years; they just didn’t expect the game to be stolen from them.

So, what would happen if bad calls cost an NFL team a playoff game? After further review, it seems everyone has an answer:

Nothing.