That is the only word that can truly describe what occurred on Monday Night Football, when the Green Bay Packers saw a wonderfully orchestrated second half comeback stolen by some terrible officiating from the NFL’s replacement referees. The Seattle Seahawks benefited from a series of atrocious calls which culminated in a hail-Mary, game winning touchdown that probably aught to have been an interception and which displayed a blatant offensive pass interference penalty by Seahawks receiver and game-winning “hero” Golden Tate.
And yet, I don’t find it right to blame the replacement officials in the light of this occurrence. The scabs that they are, the horrendous mistakes they repeatedly make on the field, and the terrible situation that the league finds itself in are all the fault of one man: Commissioner Roger Goodell.
The integrity of the NFL has been jeopardized. A team has been denied a clear victory by amateur referees in a professional sport. Now my question to you is this: Has there ever been a professional league of any sport that has been denied proper officiating because of a failure of the league to agree to terms with their own referees? Well, I for one cannot think of any situation quite like this.
We all knew that a game would be blown eventually. It was bound to happen. Everyone has griped about the replacement refs since their introduction in the preseason. Every week we have heard angry mutterings and complaints from players and coaches. The league has issued warnings to the teams to silence these remarks. But the beautiful thing about that “eye in the sky” is that it tells no lies. We have all seen the blown calls. Everyone saw Golden Tate shove Packers cornerback Sam Shields in the back moments before he got a single arm on the ball that safety M.D. Jennings held to his chest. We all know that the call was wrong, and I find no one to blame but Goodell for letting this situation unfold.
This isn’t the first time that the commissioner has struggled to come to terms with unions in the NFL. Just last season, the players themselves were involved in a lockout that ended in July, delaying training camp and eliminating months of practices and preparations for all the teams. Surely, players and coaches weren’t able to show their best possible work onto the field as a result. The game was jeopardized.
And now it has happened again. Now a team has lost a game because of the league’s unwillingness to compromise with its own officials. While Roger Goodell spent the entire offseason in a witch-hunt to punish several players and coaches on the New Orleans Saints in their supposed bounty scandal, he completely ignored something much more pressing to the NFL. He has failed in his position. He should be fired.
In a poorly officiated and uncontrolled game, players become much more aggressive drastically increasing the risk of injury. The next step in this unfortunate scenario is that someone is going to get seriously hurt as games continue to spiral further out of control. A missed holding call…a wrongly given first down…an unearned victory….?