Upon hearing reports of the referees of the National Football League officially reached agreement with the league Wednesday night, I took a long breath, and became very thankful that finally the focus can go back to football.
Last week on SportsCenter, NFL analyst Ron Jaworski said that he was sick of talking about referees, and there were probably a lot of people that turned off ESPN when they heard talk about the replacement officials.
I was one of those people.
And then Monday night happened…
As a Packers fan, Monday night was incredible. I was in shock. How could they screw that up? Then, when I heard there was no chance Green Bay would be given the victory, I moved on.
The refs screwed up. There’s no two ways about it. I have yet to hear someone say that referee in the end zone that signaled a touchdown got the call right. So, that’s that. They got it wrong. Let’s move on.
The whole season, during every football game I’ve watched, there’s been a large amount of talk about the referees and their performance. I don’t tune in to a football game to hear about the performance of the referees. I know they’re not the normal guys, but they’re doing the best they can, which unfortunately is not very good.
What is obvious is this lockout was going to end at some point, and that things were going to go back to normal eventually.
So this weekend, everything will be just like it was last year, and that includes continual yelling at the regular referees. We all are still going to get mad at the referees and their picky calls. It’s not going to change. While we will see a few less penalties, and all the zebras will know the rules now, we’re still not going to like them.
Remember, the normal referees are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. In no way, shape or form are they going to be perfect. We will still hate them all and still admire Ed Hochuli’s arms.
The first three weeks of the season were beyond annoying, though. I was more excited than ever coming into this NFL season, paying more attention and trying to understand more than ever. So what do I get? I get a continuous amount of complaining about the refereeing and little to no talk about the game itself.
After T.J. Lang, Josh Sitton, Tom Crabtree and the rest of the Packers’ tweeting brigade really let loose on the replacement officials and, more specifically, the NFL as a whole, I was initially all for the tweets.
Then, on Tuesday, I hoped it would be toned down. But as the league released a statement saying it agreed with the call made by the referees on the final play of Monday Night Football, the reaction continued.
If they expected the NFL to go against their own temporary employees and admit they were wrong, then they’d also be admitting that they were unfit to officiate and they shouldn’t be on the field.
That’s not going to happen, and the billion dollar machine that is the NFL is going to stand strong against anything and everything. What do they get from admitting their wrong? A clean conscience?
That’s just what the NFL strives for and continuously desires. They don’t care how badly the referees may have screwed up. All they care about is the attention the league got, even after something like that.
Now that we have the normal referees, it will take about two or three weeks of horrible, “getting back in the swing of things” type of calls, but after that, the NFL will be back to normal. Here’s to that, and for the normalcy to return quicker than that.