Poor officiating mars the Super Bowl

by | Feb 1, 2009 | NFL Random Thoughts, Super Bowl

We posted a couple times earlier this season that the officiating in the National Football League has gotten pathetic.

That has been magnified here during the second half of the Super Bowl.
On the first Arizona drive of the second half, Kurt Warner was pressured on third down. The ball came out of his hand but his arm was clearly coming forward. The refs, during a conference, however, decided to call it a fumble instead, requiring Arizona to burn a challenge to get the correct call.

Instant replay can be a fantastic tool for officials, but not if they use it as a crutch – too often, refs are out of position or they question their calls. So they take the cop-out and make the challengeable call, even when there is little doubt to most observers that it’s the wrong call.
Then, later in the third quarter, Darnell Dockett was flagged for roughing the passer no a play in which Ben Roethlisberger had just barely gotten his pass away.

Later on the same drive safety Adrian Wilson was flagged for running over Steelers holder Mitch Berger on a field goal attempt – Wilson was off balance and couldn’t stop and, in the opinion of Zoneblitz, he didn’t hit Berger nearly hard enough to warrant a personal foul call. That was the third personal foul on that drive – two of the three were extremely questionable.

Finally, on a fourth quarter pass from Ben Roethlisberger to Hines Ward, Rod Hood stuck with the receiver and tore the ball out of his arms from behind before Ward could come down with the catch.
On several replays I failed not only to see a hold but also any premature contact that should have resulted in a penalty. But the refs called holding and the Steelers got another first down via penalty.

This is the Super Bowl. These officials are graded during the season and the crew with the best ratings supposedly get to call the big game. If this is the best crew the league has had I rest my case. There has been and there remains a major officiating problem in the league and it is harming the integrity of the game.

Super Bowl pick: Steelers

by | Feb 1, 2009 | NFL Gambling

I’ve been turning football picks into an impressive level of futility in recent weeks, especially in games involving the Arizona Cardinals.

But I’m sticking to my guns. Pittsburgh is simply a better team than Arizona. The Cardinals got hot at the right time, rediscovering a running game that had been missing all season. And the defense is firing on all cylinders right now.

But I think the Pittsburgh pass rush will help neutralize Kurt Warner enough to give the Steelers a chance to get ahead. The Cardinals will score points in this game – I’d be looking at the over 46.5 if I were in Vegas right now.

I’m not as confident that Pittsburgh covers the seven point spraad, but if I were forced to put money down, that’s what I’d bet on.

Cowboys resembling Dallas nighttime soap opera

by | Jan 27, 2009 | Business of Football, NFL Media

It’s becoming fitting that the Dallas Cowboys play their games in the same city that was featured in one of America’s once-popular night time soap operas.

This is fantastic – just too good to be true.

Not a week after Michael Irvin announced that his former team would save one of its 80 preseason roster spots for the winner of the former receivers’ reality show, another Dallas Cowboy is getting into the mix.

This time, current wideout Terrell Owens and his entourage announced that VH1 has green-lighted a reality show during which his friends and publicists Monique Jackson and Kita Williams try to help Owens find success off the playing field.

Banyan Productions, producers of Trading Spaces, will produce the show, which is at this point untitled and unsold.

It’s probably a perfect opportunity for Owens to begin this quest. While his 2008 numbers were still good, he disappeared for a chunk of the season, though in fairness, the Cowboys’ entire offense did the same.

And while he continued for the most part to be a solid receiver he is getting up there in age. He also continued his career-long trend of behaving himself for a year or two with whatever team he happens to be on before helping to stir up some controversy with whatever quarterback he happens to be playing with at any given time (see Garcia, Jeff and McNabb, Donovan prior to this season’s tiff with Romo, Tony).

So this reality show will help keep him in the public eye as he ponders whether to patch things up with Dallas teammates or create enough of a distraction this offseason to get himself cut again.

Should be yet another entertaining offseason for T.O. – and thus for the rest of us as well.

USAToday.com broadcaster poll: Hmmmmmm

by | Jan 21, 2009 | NFL Media

One of the publictations I read (okay, scan) religiously is USAToday Sports Weekly. They’ve got decent fantasy sports advice and I will read anything that has weekly updates on each individual team – and they cover the two sports Tony and I write about in our current collection of blogs (www.brushbackpitch.com is the other, for the uninitiated).

The Web version of USA Today decided to ask fans who the best NFL broadcasters are and I found the results interesting.

NBC’s team of John Madden and Al Michaels was voted the best game announcers, getting more than 39 percent of more than 13,400 votes. My own first place vote probably would have gone to Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, though I can live with the Madden/Michaels duo. Both are on the downsides of their careers, but I remain a bigger fan of Madden than most. He’s a bit goofy these days, but still insightful. And Michaels is consistently solid.

Madden then tied with Troy Aikman for best NFL analyst. I don’t necessarily disagree with this. Along with Simms (despite his alleged knack for reguarly inserting homoerotic statements into his work, which I think is overblown but my wife insists is present in all NFL game broadcasts) , in my opinion, all three are insightful. I would add Ron Jaworski to the list. While I think he has good camaraderie with Mike Tirico and Tony Kornheiser on Monday nights, I’m always even more impressed with the job he does breaking down film during pre-game shows and the NFL draft.

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Pittsburgh v Arizona in Tampa

by | Jan 18, 2009 | NFL News

Arizona made the Super Bowl.

Damn.

The Arizona Cardinals … in the Super Bowl.

“We are who we thought we were,” read one of the signs Fox caught during the broadcast. … Well, you aren’t who I thought you were – I’ve been wrong on Arizona three times now during the playoffs.

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