Harnessed Lightening

Anyone who watched Monday Night Football on September 24^th and stayed until the (extremely) bitter end witnessed perhaps the worst officiating call in NFL history.  Trailing by 5, 4^th down, no time left on the clock, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback tossed a Hail Mary pass into the left corner of the end zone and hoped for the best. They got more than they hoped for, or could even imagine.  Green Bay’s M.D. Jennings leapt into the air and caught the ball, pulling it to his chest over Seattle’s receiver Golden Tate. Tate got his hands on the ball and they fell to the ground together, wrestling for possession.  The refs ran over to the play, looked at each other, and then one official signaled touchdown, giving Seattle a 13-12 win.  An extra point would be added to make the official score 14-12. To even the most casual observer, the Seattle receiver did not have possession of the ball, and the touchdown should not have counted.  Countless replays from every available angle confirmed this, but the call was allowed to stand and was even defended the next day by the NFL office.

I am not a huge Green Bay fan. I didn’t have money on the game, I don’t participate in any fantasy football leagues, and it’s no skin off my nose who won the game. But it’s tough to watch a team get cheated out of a win because of a bad call, and even tougher to watch the bad call be upheld for no reason other than the league’s need to save face. The NFL’s regular officials have been on strike since the beginning of the year for who-knows-what, and the NFL has been using ‘replacement officials’ throughout the preseason and for the first 3 weeks of this year.  Under-skilled commentators desperate to feign insight to otherwise boring games have tried hard to make the ‘replacement officials’ a storyline, pointing out every missed call or botched penalty as a pox on an otherwise excellent contest of judgement calls and split second decisions. 

And lord knows we’ve never had a controversial call with regular NFL officials in past years. 

But just how bad are these phony refs?  Let’s see:  With 16 games a week, 4 weeks of preseason and 3 weeks of regular season, we’ve had 112 games with these replacement officials. At an average of 130 plays per game (a conservative estimate), we’ve had a little more than 14, 500 plays run.  Let’s say they got 99% of them correct. That leaves 145 plays that are suspect.  And it only takes 5 or 6 to make a halftime video samples reel to show how ‘incompetent’ the officials are. Do you do your job perfectly 99% of the time?  Do quarterbacks make 99% of their passes?  Do linemen get their assignments right 99% of the time?  How bad do you have to be to be ‘bad’?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not defending the blown call on MNF. It was terrible, it was reversible, and unlike other mistakes with regular or replacement officials, it directly cost a team a win.  But it is being used as an excuse to condemn all replacement officials as incompetent, blundering, idiots who don’t know a yard line from a sky line.  The fact is that fans don’t have an objective standard for comparing this year’s officials to previous years. Nor are they interested in defining one. They are just mad as hell and want something to be done.  We will see how long the NFL takes to reinstate the regular officials in response to fan demands. 

Frankly, I don’t care much about the game. But I find fascinating the power of a single isolated event to incite public opinion - maybe even a public movement- that it does not necessarily merit. An obscure, cheaply made video about Muslims is used to justify attacks against US embassies around the world. I seriously doubt the protesters in Libya saw the video. Even if they did, how would it justify attacking the US Ambassador? Nobody cares. It’s not about rationale or reason; it’s about providing a vent for rage.   

Whether they are cheated cheeseheads, jilted jihadists, oppressed minorities, or threatened conservatives, the collective power of an angry mob is an awesome force to be reckoned with. Harnessed lightening. And what a powerful force it can be to move mountains if one is clever enough to spot the opportunity, skilled enough to steer it, and wise enough to know how to use it.