Nauseating or just right? Officiating in the crosshairs

Mike Pereira was in his customary spot next to Troy Aikman in the Fox Sports broadcast booth for the Bears-Vikings game on the final week of the regular season, ready to chime in when needed on any close calls on the field.

Instead, he got one in the booth when Aikman declared the officiating for the game to be “nauseating.”

“I turned away because I didn’t know if he was going to throw up on me or not,” the former NFL officiating guru turned TV analyst said with a laugh.

The weekend before, New York Jets coach Todd Bowles wasn’t laughing after his team was flagged 16 times for a team-record 172 yards in an overtime loss to the Packers.

Bowles, who was fired the next week, got a parting gift from the NFL in the form of a $25,000 fine for angrily blasting the officiating after the game — which featured a penalty about every five snaps.

“I thought we were playing two teams,” Bowles said. “I thought we were playing the Packers — and the striped shirts.”

Nothing terribly new about that. Complaining about officials is a time-honored tradition that goes back to the days coaches — and fans — saw things only as they actually happened, without the benefit of super slow motion replays that at times get more study than the Zapruder tapes of the Kennedy assassination.

Never mind that NFL officiating crews get it right a lot more than they get it wrong — the NFL said that in 2017 officials made the correct call between 95 and 97 percent of the time. The wrong calls get magnified by incessant replays, and they get discussed long after the whistle blows a play dead.

That was the case more often than the league may want to admit during the just concluded regular season, when players sometimes got just as angry as coaches about calls on the field.

Consider:

▶The reaction by Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins last month after teammate Kamu Grugier-Hill emerged from a pileup on the opening kickoff against the Cowboys with the football and the only other players in the pile were Eagles.

Somehow, though, the ball went to the Cowboys after replay officials ruled there was “no clear recovery” of the football. Dallas would go on to win a crucial late-season division matchup 29-23 in overtime.

“Whoever is watching that in New York should stay off the bottle,” Jenkins said.

It didn’t take long for Jenkins to be fined for insinuating replay officials at league headquarters were drinking.

▶A season that began with Packers linebacker Clay Matthews accusing the NFL of “going soft” after getting a string of roughing-thepasser penalties — one on a sack that some coaches around the league called “textbook” — ended with a string of calls that were both confusing and, at times, maddening.

▶The Chargers were the beneficiaries of two false start calls at Cleveland and Pittsburgh that, well, weren’t called. Both led to touchdowns.

After fourth-year down judge Hugo Cruz was fired by the league in October for a series of errors, including not calling the false start in the Cleveland game, Chargers coach Anthony Lynn said: “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen an official get fired during the season. Maybe it’s happened before and I just don’t know, but they have jobs to do. We have jobs to do. Coaches get fired during the season and players get fired during the season. That’s accountability — it happens.”

Lynn was choosing his words a lot more carefully than did Bowles or Jenkins.

The good news is that changes to the catch rule worked, and there weren’t any huge outcries over what a catch really is the way there were a season earlier. And despite Matthews’ early complaints, new measures to protect the quarterback seem to be working without taking away the physical part of the game that attracts so many fans.

But games continue to be held up for replay reviews that are far from instant. The flow of the game is way too often interrupted so calls can be reviewed, and then reviewed some more.

Replay was supposed to fix everything. But it can cause its own set of problems, too.