So remember a couple weeks ago when I said the NFL’s replacement refs would get better with practice and they wouldn’t become the story?
I was wrong. I was VERY wrong. I do not know how, but they’ve gotten worse. They’re calling games inconsistently. They’re making the wrong calls — either calling the wrong penalty, penalties on the wrong team, or calling phantom calls that aren’t actually there — and missing calls altogether. And they have NO control over the games.
If nothing else, the NFL referee lockout is proving to the world that officiating matters, and that they couldn’t, in fact, pull any guy off the street to do as good a job as the professionals. The real guys make mistakes, yes. But it turns out that they do much more to keep the game going than just make calls. They add a level of respect to the game between and amongst the players to keep them from beating up one another — which is quite impressive when, as in football (and hockey) more than most other sports, the entire POINT is to beat up the other players.
In honor of the locked out referees, I am going to give you another Ed Hochuli video. Enjoy.