Originally Posted by Rain Man
Okay, so I've given this issue a lot of thought over the past 45 seconds, and here's what I think.
First, the league has no vendetta against the Chiefs. They don't care about the Chiefs at all.
And that is precisely the problem. If you want clear proof, look at the playoff game last year. The league didn't care if the Chiefs lost or the Titans won. Both of those franchises are irrelevant to them, which is why they rewarded the worst referee in the league the game as a retirement gift instead of following their procedures and assigning refs to games based on their scoring. That's not opinion, right? Didn't the league or Triplette or someone come out and say that the game was a retirement farewell gift to Triplette?
So now let's ask ourselves. Would the league have assigned a known-to-be-subpar referee to a game with the Patriots or the Giants or another big market team? No way. They assigned Triplette to the Chiefs-Titans game because they didn't care about the Chiefs-Titans game, and they trusted the Triplette was at least competent enough to not make a scandal out of it. It turned out that they were wrong and he made a game-changing error that sent the wrong team to the next round, but whatever. Who cares. It was just the Chiefs and the Titans.
So then when you get to games like this, it's easy for a conspiracy theory to be built. There's a very strong business case to be made that the Los Angeles fan base needs to solidified. We all know Los Angeles. If their team gets behind by 10 points they're going to switch channels and watch a rerun of Breaking Bad or Entourage. I spend a lot of time in the LA area, and there's no sports culture there. It's hard to even find a sports bar that's any good. So a conspiracy theorist would say that the two Los Angeles teams need to win and be successful in their first few years in the city, or they'll fade to irrelevancy, which is why the Rams and Raiders (and even the Chargers in their first year) all left in the first place. Oh, and who's the other team in the big game? Kansas City? Meh, Kansas City doesn't matter. (Maybe that changes in the future with Patrick Mahomes II, but it clearly hasn't taken root yet.)
The game last night feeds conspiracy theories because the officiating was completely off the hook biased until the Rams got a 13 point lead. After that, it ratcheted back and was generally evenly called. Maybe that's a coincidence, but simple math (and a few reasonable assumptions) says that the odds are 1,024 to 1 against having one team called for the first 10 penalties of the game and other being called for zero. So yes, maybe it's a coincidence, but it's a rare one. Statistically, you would expect that to happen in one game leaguewide every four years, so it's going to happen, but not often.
The more charitable view, but still an evil one, is that the league wants offense. We know that the league wants offense. They were billing this game as a shootout all week, so if you're a business-oriented league, you tell the refs who are your employees to let the offenses play and be sure that we get some scoring early. This isn't even a conspiracy because it's not favoring one team over the other. It's a business decision, albeit an unethical one. I'd openly believe this, but the theory fell into question when the Chiefs' first offensive play was an 18 yard gain that was called back on a penalty that we never saw.
So yes, there are very clear business reasons for the NFL to want certain markets to do well at certain times (e.g., Los Angeles teams in the 2018-2020 time frame), and there are very clear business reasons for the NFL to want 24/7 offense. We're just supposed to have faith that the league will sacrifice those business interests in the short term to protect the long-term integrity of the sport. Look at Roger Goodell and raise your hand if you believe that he's going to do that. (And I still remember him telling a free agent, 'Why are you considering that small market team? You should be playing in New York.)
Now, are those pressures new? No. There have always been business interests competing with the integrity of the sport, all the way back to 1920. But the differences today are twofold - there's massive, massive money involved now, first and foremost. And second, because there's massive money, the ownership profile has changed. I would trust Lamar Hunt and George Halas and Paul Brown and Ralph Wilson to protect the integrity of the sport. I don't trust Robert Kraft and Stan Kroenke and Jerry Jones at all.
And then on top of all this, we have the problem of technology, which makes it much easier to be critical. In 1965, when the officials called a penalty, you just shrugged and said, "Dang. Penalty." You couldn't go back and see what happened. Now we can. Even if the game is clean as a whistle, there's going to be inconsistency in the officiating, and what's more, replays make the definition of penalties much more complex. Technology is the reason that we've seen endless debates over what is a catch, or what is control of a ball when a player goes over the goal line. The rules are necessarily becoming more complex, and that means that more penalties must be called and more judgments must be made in real time. And that's a major, major problem. If you believe the games are clean, what we're seeing is that human referees cannot judge the complexity of the game accurately in real time.
Even if we assume that the game is clean as a whistle and that everyone at every level of every organization is acting in the best interest of the sport, a very clear imperative is that we need to simplify the rules. Right now, roughly 10 percent of the plays on the field result in a penalty, and the number is rising. That cannot continue. We can't have games like last night where 30 percent of the first quarter's plays are the result of penalty calls. Not only does it damage the entertainment value, but it leads to inconsistency and the appearance of bias. If the league is pure and honest and clean, their next mission HAS to be changes to the game to simplify the rulebook.
Okay, that was rambling. I feel like the Unabomber now.
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