Midweek thoughts

It’s been a long time coming. But it has fully arrived and is throwing the National Football League for a loop.

I have been watching football for a long time, but I can’t remember when officiating has overtaken the game itself with regard to conversation. Less talk of the game; more talk about the officials. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

Coaches and more than a few players, after getting hosed by officials’ call(s), clench their teeth and say for the most part the officials did not cost them the game. They don’t believe one syllable. They don’t want money subtracted from their paychecks.

Flag day, it seems, is celebrated all around the NFL now on a weekly basis. Maybe it’s because the league promoted six new officials to referee last season and it takes time to acclimate. Then again, maybe it’s the rules book and how it is enforced that is the causal factor for some shoddy officiating this season.

It seems as though just about every game on the schedule erupts with questionable officiating. I can’t remember when so many penalty flags have been thrown. “There’s a flag on the play” is uttered monotonously too often by broadcasters.

Players are not only confused, they are angry. Same with coaches and team owners. The spate of yellow laundry being tossed around with alarming regularity is making what should be entertainment seem less entertaining.

That and instant replay. Put those two together and the fun of watching grown men playing a collision sport loses its flavor. It’s almost as though the game is interrupting the penalty flags.

In an effort to make certain games are played to perfection for the paying patrons, games slog along with numerous interruptions while efforting to maintain that perfection.

It has reached the point where the rules book has become so obese, the league’s officials are required to approach each game with almost encyclopedic knowledge of how to officiate a game.

Many years ago, veteran Philadelphia NFL reporter Les Bowen pointedly nailed what the officiating problem was and back then, the rules book was not nearly as thick as it is now.

It involved a decision made at the time by referee Tony Corrente, a 25-year NFL veteran official who is still around. “The real problem here isn’t Tony Corrente or any other zebras,” Bowen wrote.

“The bigger problem is, either out of concern over concussions or just wanting to codify every little nuance of the sport, the NFL has passed so many rules, the game has become impossible to officiate consistently.”

Here we are a decade later and the league has done absolutely nothing to make the game easier to officiate, thickening the rules book to the point where it’s almost as though officials rely on replay to justify their calls.

Too many plays in the game are subject to review in the event a coach, his red challenge flag at the ready, or an eye in the sky (the replay booth) want to “take a look” at the tape and make sure perfection is maintained.

It has reached the point where an officiating team can never have the kind of game that is rewarded with praise. That will never happen again.

Replay, which I have never been in favor of, is the main culprit. It has taken officials’ jobs and placed them under a microscope. They are expected to be perfect and then improve on that.

These are human beings we’re talking about here. Humans make mistakes. They don’t like to, but it is inevitable. And when they do, especially the most egregious ones, they catch holy hell.

Players make mistakes, too. A missed block here, a blown assignment there. A dropped pass, a fumble. Their misdeeds can cost their team the game. But they are soon forgotten. Not those by officials, though. Replay takes the human factor out of it.

Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers said it best after a bad call against Detroit in the final minute of a Monday night game a couple of weeks ago helped the Packers knock off the Lions. “I think (bad calls) equal out over the years,” he said.

It is time to return to the human way of doing things in football when it comes to officiating. It’s time to limit the number of opportunities to use replay as an officiating tool and accept the fact that as long as humans play and officiate the game, mistakes will be made.

Fortunately, mistakes on a football field do not have a profound, lasting impact on our lives. At least they shouldn’t.

Fans watched and presumably enjoyed watching the NFL without major officiating problems until 1986. That’s when the league experimented with replay, expanding it in 1999 to allow challenges.

Every once in a great while, an egregiously horrendous missed call by an official creates an audible outcry and stirs up enough interest and NFL owners would listen. Then they would do nothing because they knew the incidence of it happening again was infinitesimal.

This time, though, they relented to an outcry (from New Orleans Saints fans) and put in the outrageously moronic rule to use replay as a tool to determine whether there was pass interference by either team. The results have proved farcical.

Why is that? Because Al Riveron, head of the league’s officials, rules against every red challenge flag (except one) thrown to test the new rule. He is looking for “clear and obvious visual evidence to overturn the call on the field” and sees none.

Hidden in that explanation is the interpretation of “clear and obvious” and Riveron uses it to duck under the eye-of-the-beholder tent. That’s one rule that will not see a second season.

If the competition committee of the NFL wants to make a wise rules change, it should seriously consider changing defensive pass interference from a spot foul to a 15-yard penalty and an automatic first down as they do in college football. Now that, at least from this viewpoint, makes much more sense.