When Brady talks, the league listens — and acts
Tom Brady has clout, and his indignation may have saved the NFL’s 100th season from being ruined by the refs even though he backtracked like he was avoiding Shaq Barrett .
Yellow flags flew at an alarming rate over the first two weeks of the season, and Shawn Hochuli’s crew called 20 infractions Thursday night in the Titans-Jaguars game — starting on the very first play from scrimmage — that kicked off Week 3.
With 15 flags thrown in the first half, eight of them for offensive holding, Brady said he’d seen enough and was turning off the game .
By the time the Bears bamboozled Case Keenum into five turnovers Monday night, officials were throwing half as many flags for offensive holding as they had been before the weekend.
The NFL made backside offensive holding a point of emphasis this season, asking officials to flag what’s known as a “lobster block” where O-linemen wrap their arms around a defender when blocking on the backside of running plays.
The officials went overboard, however, throwing flags for holding all over the field. They called 188 offensive holding penalties in the first 33 games, including 10 in the Titans-Jaguars game.
By halftime, Brady was tweeting, “Too many penalties. Just let us play!!!” and then, “I’m turning off this game I can’t watch these
ridiculous penalties anymore.”
Analyst Troy Aikman noted Brady’s tweets on the game broadcast, saying, “Tom Brady is one of the least controversial people we have in our game. He is league royalty. When he makes a statement like that, that should get somebody’s attention.” It sure did. Al Riveron, the league’s senior vice president of officiating, held a conference call with referees Saturday, ESPN reported, and they were instructed to stick to the backside holding calls and allow more time for Olinemen to get their hands inside the frame of defenders on front-side and other blocks.
The officials only flagged offensive holding 45 more times the rest of the weekend, an average of three a game, down from nearly six a game before Sunday.
Brady tried to make nice with the officials a day after complaining about all the flags, saying, “I’m very pro-ref.”
The backtracking by one of the NFL’s biggest stars makes sense, because he relies on the officials to protect him when 300-pound defenders are bearing down on him in the pocket. Dolphins linebacker Raekwon McMillan told The Miami Herald that a member of the officiating crew told him after a legal hit on Brady last week, “Stay off Tom .”
On his weekly Westwood One interview that aired Monday night, Brady explained his initial criticism, saying, “I want to see tough, hard-nosed football. When I was watching the other night, I decided to turn it off because I didn’t feel like that’s what I was seeing.”