All it took was the worst non-call in NFL history.
According to ESPN, the NFL and NFL Referees Association reached an agreement Wednesday night and ended the referee lockout. While the rest of football nation sighs in relief, Green Bay Packer fans just sigh.
The best piece of media I’ve seen or read representing the absurdity of the Wilson-Tate pass, “catch,” and touchdown is a picture of two referees standing in the endzone of CenturyLink Field: one signaling interception, the other touchdown.
Without a conference of officials, the touchdown call was affirmed. Don’t worry, it will be reviewed. They can’t uphold that, right? Official announces: “Upheld.” Oh.
One of the announcers offered a half-hearted defense of the booth review, saying a shared-possession call can’t be over-turned on review. But then it came out that, yes, it actually can. After that, the commentators didn’t try to defend the call: “I don’t feel good about this. I don’t like the way this game finished. I have a bad taste in my mouth,” John Gruden said.
The Twittersphere exploded.
After a series of anti-NFL, expletive filled Tweets, Packer lineman T.J. Lang tweeted this gem:
“[Unprintable-word] it NFL.. Fine me and use the money to pay regular refs.”
As of 1 a.m., Thursday morning, that tweet has 98,177 retweets.
But if all Packer fans aren’t sighing, at least this one is still. That may have something to do with the settle-your-differences column I had finished for Wednesday, only to receive a text explaining that the NFL and NFLRA, in fact, did, and I needed to write about that. To steal Vonnegut’s line: So it goes.
But really I’m still sighing for reasons beyond a hack-column written in the a.m. Will the loss affect the Packers post-season chances? Maybe. The NFC North does look to be a competitive division this year, but we’ll only know come January. But a lot of chance-events happen every season, and if Green Bay does miss the playoffs, pointing back to one bad call would be a lot more than copout: it’d be BS.
No, I’m still sighing, and really all NFL fans should be sighing, because of the utter insanity of the whole thing. What do labor disputes, scabs, and Twitter fines have in common? Football. Weird.
Is it a good thing the league and officials settled? Sure. We’re all glad the referees earning an average of $150,000 for a seven-month season while working one day a week for three hours at a time secured their workers’ rights from those billionaire jerks or whatever. Great.
But let’s get back to football.