Football Fans of the World, Unite! How to End NFL Referee Corruption

One of the inherent problems of addressing concerns of sports fans rationally is their disjointedness based on location. It is very difficult for a sports fan to acknowledge the greatness of a rival team, or even the players on a rival team, and it's almost impossible to do so as a casual fan.

So while I can acknowledge that my status as a devoted Packers fans will inherently make my opinions on last night's Packers-Vikings game seem biased. No Vikings fan wants to acknowledge that the team's victory may have been more the product of ticky-tack referee calls.

Certainly ESPN wouldn't acknowledge anything resembling referee favoritism, especially when it involves one of the flagship financial goldmines of the NFL season: a Monday Night Football game involving Brett Favre, the most popular NFL player of the last 15 years, facing the team that defined his Hall of Fame career.

Nonetheless, the blatant favoritism from referees and the media alike last night was pretty hard to deny if you do not currently live in Minnesota. The flagrant calls in the first half of last night's game were exceedingly blatant, none more so than the pass interference called against Charles Woodson in the endzone on an exceptional play for a would-be interception. The referees took every chance they could get to call defensive holding or interference on the Packers, perhaps knowing that the Packers high penalty total would cover their tracks.

This would be devastating for any team, but it's worse in its crippling effect on the best pair of physical cornerbacks that were the toast of the NFL when Favre led the Packers to the NFC Championship game just two years ago. It was also devastating that Jared Allen, who is good enough that he doesn't need to bend the rules, got away with far too much roughing of the passer than he needed to. It's hard to argue with 4.5 sacks, but he played dirty all night, as his end-of-half scuffle indicated. I can only imagine the uncalled holding penalties on the Vikings vaunted o-line performance that were not shown by the camera crew.

Which leads me to ESPN's coverage of the game, which was ridiculously biased in Favre's favor even by ESPN standards. If you were to play the Favre drinking game that was established in his Packers days (one shot for the word "gunslinger" 1 shot for "he looks like a kid out there," etc.), you would have been dead midway through the second quarter. Worst of all was Ron Jaworski, normally the most reserved and analytical of ESPN's announcers, who sounded like a 13-year-old girl writing "Ron Favre" in his secret diary. John Gruden, despite having more of a football attitude on top of his know-how, was no less unabashed in his praise of Favre looking like a kid while pushing 40.

This is the kind of thing that casual football fans, and even the most die-hard, intelligent Vikings fan will allow. But it's a lie so blatant that any devoted fan can see right through it. This kind of disdain for referee favoritism, cynical corporate motivations, and the media's willfully blind eye is where sports talk radio callers and sports bloggers meet, with slightly less conviction in conspiracy theories among the latter group.

The damaged reputation of referees is legendary in the NBA. It is less well known but just as problematic in the NFL. Usually when these kind of things happen in the NFL, it comes in highly important games with national exposure. The most recent examples of suspicions of referee bias have come with the Steelers-Colts in the 2006 Divisional Playoffs and Steelers-Seahawks in that year's Super Bowl, the Eagles-Saints in the 2007 Divisional Playoffs, and the Ravens-Patriots Monday Night game in the 2007 season).

In most of these cases, the NFL dismisses the need for accountability by playing off of the stereotypes of lunatic fans, and it blows over once a new story emerges the next week. Usually, the NFL is right to some extent, but not enough to make the perpetual concerns with NFL refereeing go away.

Because of the suspicion and violations that have been so well-documented in the NBA, that league has become more transparent in monitoring its referees, hiring them full time and publicly explaining its evaluation policy. One thing Roger Goodell's tenure with the NFL has not been known for is transparency, and it's difficult to expect the Commissioner's Office to be more transparent without provocation (he's not Bud Selig).

Nonetheless, as Ed Hochuli proved last year, even the most respected NFL referee can't initiate a discussion that leads to reform when it doesn't match up to the league's policy from the top down. The only one who can do so is fans, who have the financial leverage and potential for grassroots action.

In 2006, sports blogger and radio host Keith Hayes started an online petition to make the NFL's referee statistics public. The petition hasn't taken off much since then, perhaps since Hayes is a Patriots fan, and thus has to overcome a notorious reputation for fan whining. I hate the Patriots and everything about Boston area sports teams as much as I hate anything in sports. The only thing I hate more is when the NFL engages in dubious industry practices that go unchecked by the mainstream sports media industry that the NFL is in bed with. This is all at the expense of the fans, who bankroll every level of sports industry corruption.

If you love football, I urge you to sign the Petition to make NFL Referees statistics public. It's the only way to break from the norm, and fans are more empowered to do so now than ever.