Stop Fixing Games and Start Fixing The Officiating

(Photo by Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images)

The National Football League is broken. It’s not the crappy teams playing crappy games (Bengals v. Browns and Redskins v. Bucs this past weekend); it’s not the glossed-over shadow of steroids hanging over the hugely jacked-up players; it’s not Hines Ward’s smug smile. On second thought, it could be Ward’s Joker grin.

            I’m in no fit state to write this commentary right now, bear with me. Less than an hour ago, the Ravens lost a heartbreaker to the Pats in a game fraught with questionable-at-best calls by a supposedly veteran officiating crew. I am, to be utterly honest, a wreck right now. However, taken with that gigantic lump of rock salt, bear with me. Read this, check out the highlights, and decide for yourself.

            The NFL plays favorites. It’s as simple as that. So many penalty and challenge calls are subjective enough that the officiating crew can literally win or lose almost any given game.

            The Pats and Steelers are the largest beneficiaries of this charade, as the league will do whatever it takes to give these teams the chance to win big games. The Ravens, conversely, are not one of the NFL’s darlings. In fact, the Ravens have gotten enough objectionable calls and ex-awful-coach-turned-awful-color-commentator Brian Billick made enough noise about said calls that a vicious cycle exists in regards to officiating in Ravens games.

            The problem dates back years, as far as or farther than 2005, when referee Mike Carey called a record 21 penalties for 147 yards on the Ravens and blatantly blew a fumble/forward pass challenge call that allowed Tatum Bell to take the ball to the Ravens’ 1. On one crucial second-half drive, there were two defensive holding penalties on the Ravens’ nose tackle on third downs that the Lions failed to convert.

            In an effort to keep from going Frank Francisco on this computer and to keep this under 5000 words, I won’t even talk about the Steelers’ Super Bowl victory over the Seahawks, one of the three worst-officiated games in NFL history. Four words: tackling below the waist.

            So let’s just focus on two specific games in which the men in striped shirts indubitably influenced the outcome: Patriots at Ravens on December 3, 2007 and Ravens at Patriots on October 4, 2009.

            In 2007, the Pats were 11-0 and the media darlings behind the NFL’s most prolific offense of all time. The Ravens were 4-7 en route to an abysmal season that finally got the aforementioned Billick canned, three seasons after it should have happened.        

            Following a Stephen Gostkowski field goal with 8:46 left in the game, the Ravens cling to a 24-20 lead against the best team in the NFL. With 1:48 to play, the Pats have the ball at the Ravens’ 30 on 4th-and-1. This is when the insanity starts.

            The Pats hand the ball to fullback Heath Evans, who gets stopped for a loss of a yard and effectively ends the game. But! Apparently, Ravens’ defensive coordinator Rex Ryan called a timeout to the linesman as the ball was snapped. Not only is it questionable whether or not Ryan actually called the timeout in time, but by rule, NFL coordinators are not allowed to call timeouts.

            Following the dubiously legal timeout, the Pats moved the ball to the Ravens’ 13, where they faced 4th-and-5 with 55 seconds to play. Tom Brady throws an incompletion to Ben Watson, and the game is over again. But wait! A good five second after the play was over, Ravens’ defensive back Jamaine Winborne was called for illegal contact, the most ticky-tack penalty in the game, and one that referees whip out whenever they want a rock-solid drive extender.

            Now the Pats have the ball with a 1st-and-goal from the Ravens 8, and Brady finds Jabar Gaffney in the corner of the end-zone on a ball that the refs initially ruled incomplete. Upon further review, and, it should be mentioned, despite the existence of less conclusive evidence than there is that Vlad Tepes was a vampire, the call was overturned and Gaffney was awarded a touchdown.

            Now, maybe the Pats score anyway on a subsequent play, but the fact remains that there were three obviously incorrect calls in the last seven plays of a drive that decided a game that threatened to dethrone the NFL’s undefeated darlings. The game ended with the Ravens having been penalized 13 times for 100 yards while the Pats were penalized 4 times for 30 yards.

            After the game, Ravens cornerback Chris McAlister said, “It’s hard to go out there and play the Patriots and the refs at the same time.” This was the same game in which head linesman Phil McKinnely allegedly repeatedly called Ravens corner Samari Rolle “boy”.

            Fast-forward almost two years to the Ravens-Pats game in week four. By way of introduction, I watched this game with TCR sportswriter Tim Jackson, a Pats’ fan who gets as riled up about them as I do about the Ravens. No one, in a miraculous outcome, was killed.

            The calls were as ridiculously one-sided as the last time the teams met. Even if I’m seeing things through reality-obscuring purple glasses, which I doubt is the case, many of these gripes are corroborated by Pats’ fan.

            Late in the first quarter, down 7-3, Brady misses on a 3rd-and-9 pass intended for Watson but gets dealt a glancing blow to the shoulder/side of helmet by Haloti Ngata and draws a roughing the passer flag, a call that enables the Pats to continue their drive and pick up a touchdown.

            Later in the second quarter, an even more egregious roughing the passer call again enables the Pats to score a touchdown, as Terrell Suggs attempts to tackle Brady, who swings his right leg out of the way. It’s possible that Suggs nicked Brady, and it’s possible that Brady successfully Ole!-ed the linebacker. Either way, the call, again in a long-yardage situation (2nd-and-11), handed the Pats a first down and fifteen key yards in Raven territory. Two plays later, Sammy Morris scored the Pats’ second TD. At this point we’re at two Patriots touchdowns and two extremely poor calls to set up those touchdowns.

            In case anyone watching thought that the game was going to be fairly officiated in the second half, referee Ron Winter quickly dispelled that notion by calling an illegal contact penalty on the Ravens’ Chris Carr on a 3rd-and-10 pass intended for Wes Welker. Not only did Carr merely stand still while Welker ran into him, but Welker stopped, extended his arms into Carr’s chest, and then made his cut, a move that is essentially the definition of offensive pass interference.

            Following the next play, the officiating crew issued an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on “the Baltimore bench,” an entity so rarely penalized that ESPN’s box score of the game has the term in quotation marks. Ravens’ coach John Harbaugh was arguing the illegal contact penalty in some less-than-courteous language and was assessed the 15-yard penalty.

            Finally, in the most game-deciding call of the day, the refs miserably missed a spot on a Patriots’ fake field goal in the fourth quarter. On 4th-and-4 from the Ravens’ 9, holder Chris Hanson passed a ball to Chris Baker, who had sprinted wide left as the play was starting. Baker was called for illegal motion, which was the correct call, as he was moving at the snap, but caught the pass and was pushed out of bounds at (according to the video evidence) the 5-and-a-half yard-line.

            Harbaugh challenged the spot, since multiple angles showed that the ball was at least a foot short of the first-down marker when it crossed the plane of the sideline. Had Baker been short, the Ravens would have gotten the ball down by a score of 24-21. Instead, the Pats moved back five yards and Gostkowski nailed a field goal to make the score 27-21, a difference that played a huge role later, as the Ravens were forced to go for it on 4th-and-4 from the Pats’ 14 with 32 seconds to play. Had they been down just three points, chances are that they would have kicked the game-tying field goal instead of throwing the ball to Mark Clayton, who dropped the most important pass of the team’s young season.

            By my count, the number of egregiously bad calls in the Pats’ favor was four while the number of similar calls that went the Ravens’ way was zero. Tim, a die-hard Pats fan, classified it as two obviously incorrect calls against the Ravens and two extremely questionable calls. 

            After the game, he said to his dad, “If you happen to meet a Ravens’ fan in Boston and he complains about the officiating, well, he’s got a legitimate point.”

            The Ravens ended up with 9 penalties for 85 yards while the Pats were tagged with 5 flags for 41 yards.

            If this just sounds like a homer’s ravings, check out the replays. I’m sure you can find them on ESPN or YouTube, and see what you think. If two rabid football fans on opposite sides of the game come away with the same opinion, the chances are probably good that they’re right.

            All I ask, NFL, is that you please fix this problem instead of fixing games. The league’s credibility is highly in question when certain teams are assured of getting all of the questionable calls in a football game.  

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