NFL must review self in off-season
The $14 billion league with the $40 million commissioner is using five-cent index cards to measure first downs in a game with playoff implications. The NFL sure is a hi-tech league that leaves nothing to chance.
The commissioner, owners, competition committee, game officials, the super slow motion instant replays, the big bosses in the game day command center at 345 Park Avenue and the makers of index cards, have done the impossible.
They have made professional football impossible to watch. The fun is gone. It’s too aggravating. It can be fixed, but back in simpler times when a catch was a catch — you know, the receiver catches the ball and “survive the ground” was more appropriate for skydivers — and over-officious jerks (an old Marv Levy description of the zebras) were not the stars of the show, the game was so much more enjoyable to sit back with your feet up.
Ratings for Sunday’s Patriots-Steelers game — a season-high 26.9 million viewers — may convince Roger Goodell that there is more good in his professional world than just his new $200 million contract extension, but that’s a shortsighted approach.
The NFL powers have turned every play, every game, into the Olympics. Fans don’t know if a catch is a catch until the judges check in.
Al Riveron, the senior vice president of officiating, reviews catches from 40 different angles at NFL headquarters before being able to discern if the ball moved one quarter of one rotation when the receiver reaches out for the goal line or hits the ground.
Fans have to hold off celebrating big plays until they make sure there are no penalty flags littering the field. I promise there are at least five or six plays per game when no flag is thrown, although I am open to a recount.
Surely, some fans were turned off by the national anthem protests, but is that really a reason to stop watching? The NFL can blame Donald Trump — I mean, why not? — for his divisive comments about the league. But the truth is the game has become exhausting to watch because of all the minutiae that has destroyed logical thinking. It’s also painful watching players getting strapped down on body boards after another vicious hit.
Once this season ends with Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis on Feb. 4, the NFL needs to hold a summit and come up with a reset. What’s wrong? Too Many Penalties I noticed this about two or three years ago. Every big play is not complete without a flag. How can fans celebrate a long pass play or a touchdown when there’s a good chance there’s a yellow hankie on the field somewhere? Fans watching at home have been conditioned to brace for the yellow box that shows up on the TV to indicate a flag has been thrown.
There are too many flags thrown away from the play that have no impact on the play. There are too many ticky-tack penalties called. Not one fan comes to the stadium or watches on television hoping the officials play a bigger role in the outcome than Tom Brady or Cam Newton. What’s The Catch? The answer always used to be Dwight Clark’s leaping grab from Joe Montana to beat the Cowboys in the 1981 NFC Championship Game.
Now nobody knows what a catch is. Or perhaps the better way to say it is nobody knows what a catch should be. By the letter of the law, the officials got it right in Pittsburgh on Sunday. All common sense would say, however, that Steelers tight end Jesse James made the game-winning catch to beat the Patriots with 28 seconds left.
After further review, it was ruled he did not complete the catch because as he lunged into the end zone the ball was still spinning as it hit the ground. If he was a running back, it would not have mattered because he had crossed the plane. Even though it looked like James made a football move after he caught the ball and thus would only need to cross the plane, it was ruled he was still in the act of securing the ball and it was an incomplete pass.
When Cowboys president Tex Schramm, the godfather of instant replay, successfully pushed to get instant replay into the game in the mid-80s, this is not what he had in mind. Head Games ESPN used to have a “Jacked Up” segment on its Monday night pregame show celebrating the monster hits from the 15 games on Sunday.
Even before ESPN made a big deal about the big hits, the NFL was doing it. NFL Films produced videos for sale and the league monetized the bone-crunching collisions.
In a 1990 game coached by Buddy Ryan, the Eagles injured nine Washington players in a vicious beat down. It became known as the “Body Bag Game.” If that happened today, there would be an outcry to suspend the entire team and ban Ryan for life.
Fans used to salivate at the big hits until CTE became part of the everyday football language. Instead of waiting for the next big hit to bring them out of their seats, the next big hit gets them to switch the channel.
If parents are going to stop their sons from playing football, are they going to stop them from watching it, too?
A five-cent index card helped determine the Cowboys made a crucial first down against the Raiders last week. It’s going to take a lot more than that to fix the rest of the game.