1/9/03 - Cue Johnny Mathis; start music for The Twelfth of Never. This is a topic that just will not go away. It started with outrage – completely justified on the part of the NY Giants and their fans – and has deteriorated into a series of PR happenings. It has now reached the point of silliness and it is time to return to the feelings of outrage. This time the outrage is not at the officials; it is at the boneheads who will not put this story in the past where it inevitably will have to stay.

Why does it have to stay in the past? Because there is only one action that can be taken whereby it will not be consigned to the past just by the flow of events. Now hear this:

Until or unless the NFL declares last Sunday's Giants/49ers game null and void and either replays it from the beginning or from the time of the botched call or until the NFL finds a way to reinsert the NY Giants into the playoffs this year, the Giants are no longer playing football this season. All of the discussions and press releases and procedural reviews and homage to the gods of accountability will not change that simple and inexorable conclusion to Sunday's game.

As the pages flip on the calendar, this mistake is destined to be part of historical lore and record; let's do what we can to put it there starting now. The back judge made a terrible mistake. However, Chris Mortenson said Sunday night on ESPN that the back judge who made this terrible mistake grades out as the best back judge in the NFL. Obviously, I have no way of confirming that; I can't even confirm that the back judge and Chris Mortenson are not related in some way. So, I have to rely on the fact that Chris Mortenson has a cushy gig with ESPN and is not likely to jeopardize it by making that kind of thing up; since he put it on the air, I have to believe that someone with some level of credibility told him that.

Then, the officiating crew as a whole made a big mistake by not realizing that the "big fellow with a number in the sixties" was actually an eligible receiver. One of the things they teach you in Officiating 101 is to know who is and is not eligible to go downfield on each and every play. They did not. How can I be so sure of that? No one on the crew went dashing into the center of the play to make that fact known.

Despite his comments the next day, I think Jim Fassel made a big mistake. He says that he tried to get the officials to call the penalty. As I saw the play and the officials' call and the ending of the game – probably about 50 times now – Fassel is trotting to the center of the field to find Steve Mariucci just as the game ended with an unhappy but resigned look on his face. He is not jumping around like a madman or trying to find a game official or a league official to point out the terrible error that has just been made. He has been very gracious in the aftermath of this situation, but I think he was not 100% on top of what had happened at the moment it happened.

So with all that as a backdrop and the sports TV shows playing the tape of the whole mess about 5,000 times on Sunday night, the NFL machine decided to speak out. Oh swell; that was a big help. First the supervisor of officials said that he had spoken to the officiating crew; then the NFL acknowledged publicly that "mistakes have been made"; then the commish said that the officials' performance was unacceptable. And still it goes on.

Now we have learned that there will be new procedures for officials to follow if a call is in dispute. These new procedures will be implemented now and not next year. Hold onto your hats because here it is:

When a call is in dispute, all of the officials on the crew will come together for a huddle/discussion and not just the ones who were involved in the dispute over the call.

Think about that for just a moment. One of the officials on the other side of the field who saw nothing go awry – or else he would have thrown a flag and become a party to the dispute – will now trot his buns over to a huddle to offer his perception of the play which would have to be "I didn't see anything related to what you guys are talking about or else I'd have had my flag on the field too." The basis of this so flawed that it defies description. You do not add anything to the proper resolution of a dispute by adding people with no knowledge of the events to the discussion of what happened. I've already heard some of the talking heads say that this will bring objective people into the officials' huddle so that there will be better calls. Horse-hockey!!

Let me say this unequivocally: Ignorance and objectivity are not synonyms. The added officials to the huddle will be ignorant of what happened on the field and adding them to the mix of people who have to decide what actually happened adds no factual knowledge. Therefore the quest for "objectivity" and "truth" will not be advanced even one iota.

Secondly, committees are not the optimal way to get to a correct decision in many walks of life. I suspect that deciding on penalties in a football game is one of those situations. Therefore, taking what used to be a "small committee discussion" and turning it into a "large committee discussion" is not going to make it better. Call this what it is; it is the knee-jerk reaction of an organization that has attained bureaucratic arteriosclerosis.

Another change that the commish has effected is that officials will be told to watch for different things during field goal attempts. Say what??? There was probably a field goal attempt on the first weekend of the NFL back before most people had heard of Babe Ruth, and there have been field goal attempts every weekend since then. Now the commish has detected a flaw in the way that these plays have been officiated for the last 80 years and he will fix that flaw? No offense, Mr. Tagliabue, but I'd like to know just what officiating credentials you have to make such pronouncements and decisions. I have no way to know this, but I have a hunch that you have not spent a lot of time as a football referee – or a referee of any other sport.

In an ESPN interview, the commish said that this situation called for leadership by the league and the people who oversee the officials – and by extension, himself but he was too modest to take the limelight here. Here is one of his statements:

"The most important thing to do as a leader is to support your people and reinforce your people and their confidence and their conviction. In this case, that means all of our officiating crews."

Excuse me one more time. I'm sure these folks feel supported and reinforced and confident at this point. Here is a league that can take years to decide on a rule change and can take six months to have a committee study and make recommendations on the length of sock that can be exposed on a uniform. This is a league that moves at a glacial pace. Now they are making changes on the fly and within hours. All because of a blown call by officials. Hmmm… If I were about to referee a game this weekend, I know I'd feel like the league had my back.

Even worse, the commish was asked about the future of the crew that did that game. Now here is a point where he could have showed some leadership and supported his folks and made some comment that had a prayer of creating reinforced confidence. He could have said that they would certainly get bad marks for that call, but that it would be factored into their overall performance in just the same way that the league evaluates every officiating crew after every season. Not the commish. He said that the league would put off those decisions and discussions until after the Super Bowl. That was a horrible thing for him to say for two reasons:

That leaves the people on that crew hanging out to dry.

That assures that some reporter somewhere made a note in his Palm Pilot to go and ask the commish sometime in March whatever happened to the officiating crew.

And when that reporter asks that question, this story will come back to life. It will be like the sequels to all the monster movies. Someone finds a dead body with a wooden stake in its chest; he pulls out the stake; the monster terrorizes the neighborhood for a while; someone puts the stake back in the heart. Stand by, folks; the commish just guaranteed you The Return of the Biffed Call. I need that like I need a blocked intestine…

Like I said at the start of all of this, nothing that the league has done since Sunday changes a damned thing. All the league has accomplished is to keep a story that it wished would have never happened right on the front page of the sports section. And until the league stops trying to polish its image and position itself and all that management-speak nonsense, it will continue to have this embarrassment tossed in its face. Cue Johnny Mathis again:

And that's a long, long time…

But don't get me wrong, I love sports...

<< Back to the Topical Rants Index

= Home = Recent = Topical = Wagers =
= Archives = Pros = Scores = Contact =