Anyone not trapped under something heavy knows what went down with last night’s Monday Night Football – the avalanche of botched calls ending with the complete clusterfuck in the end zone at the end, which to all the world looks like a missed decision that flipped the outcome of the game. Golden Tate apparently committed offensive pass interference and then failed to gain simultaneous possession of the ball from M. D. Jennings, who for all the world appeared to have the pick (which one official signaled before evidently being overruled). And Seattle got a measure of revenge for Super Bowl XL, when shaky officiating probably cost them a trophy.
Golden Tate is making no apology for how things came out, and is catching abuse for it in some quarters. Horseshit. There are people responsible for calling fouls against Golden Tate, and they are not one of them named Golden Tate. If players flagged their own fouls, we wouldn’t have officials at all. We’d be playing out on the sandlot after church on Sunday afternoon. Hell, don’t forget Seattle luck-boxed into a home playoff game at 7-9 because nobody took into account that a team with a losing record might get home field over one with 11 wins, and they didn’t rush to bail out of the playoffs or give back their win over the Saints. We have officials, like we have government, because we need higher authority than our own judgement.
But the NFL, in its infinite wisdom, has declared that officials are fungible and are going with the absolute dregs of the football officiating world, all for the sake of a sum well south of a million dollars per year per team. One estimate pegged the amount of money that would represent complete capitulation to the original refs as roughly fifty cents per game ticket. Which is literally a rounding error on the daily take of an NFL franchise. So why? Why on Earth would a multi-billion-dollar business risk the health of its players and the integrity of its competition for money that could be found in the couch cushions?
Part of it is about breaking the refs’ union, to be sure – ironic as hell that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker was agitating on Twitter for the return of the real refs – but in no small part, it’s because they can. As Steve Young famously raged, demand for pro football is inelastic. The contracts are signed, the TV rights sold, the season tickets already paid for. As long as people keep watching, the NFL has no incentive whatsoever to back down. Meanwhile, at this point, if I were leading the union for the refs? I would pull all my current proposals and concessions off the table and say “Fuck you, pay me.” After all, this is not a strike. The refs didn’t walk out, just as the players didn’t walk out last year. Once again, the NFL is flexing its muscle as the 800 pound gorilla of American sport and demanding its own way simply because it can. And its owners have bought into the Randian myth wholesale: they are the elite, the job creators, and we should count ourselves blessed to walk in their shadow and question them not.
Fuck. That.
The NFL is what it has always been: bloated, arrogant, hidebound, a league of assholes operated by assholes, a garbage organization with human garbage at its helm. The one good thing to come of this fiasco is that now the emperor’s clothes are in a flaming pile in an end zone at Quest Field, and everyone knows it.