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Nobody's Ever Seen a Smiling Zebra in the Wild

 An obvious unnecessary roughness call in the AFC championship game last night was made by an official and more or less gave the Chiefs their chance to win the game on a last-second field goal, which they did. This made many people, not all of them Cincinnati Bengals, very mad.

The night before that, an equally obvious foul by the Celtics on LeBron James was not called, giving the Celts a chance to win their game with the Lakers in overtime, which they did. This made a lot of people very mad, too.

The resulting brouhahas make yours truly feel very very tired. There is nothing in sports so tedious and soul-wearying as arguments about officiating in big games, in any game (one of the first things I learned in sportswriting was that whatever game you were at was the biggest in the world to the people in it). These disputes, the #NFLisrigged hashtags polluting social media this morning, stem from two facts about human nature so basic they were known to Cro-Magnon Man. To wit, losing sucks. To further wit, human beings and human endeavors can never be perfect.

There's a third fact in play here, too, one most sports fans and sports leagues refuse to acknowledge. Officials are athletes. NFL and NBA officials are top notch world-class athletes. Maybe they're not as big, strong and fast as the athletes they regulate, but they face stresses those jocks don't.

No load management for NBA refs. They go the full 48 every night. No two-platoon officiating crews in the NFL. They don't have heated benches, big parkas or stocking caps like the players did last night, either. They freeze their asses off the whole game.

We the observers accept that the playing athletes, even the very best, can have bad games. We even more easily accept they can make bad plays at crucial times, plays that decide games. We even accept that coaches and managers can make boneheaded decisions. These things can break fans' hearts. They can spur civic outrage and despair. But we the crowd know these misfortunes take place all the time, and are to be borne as another part of the suffering that is the sports' followers destiny 98 times out of 100.

At the same time, everybody in sports denies this tolerance to officiating. That's gotta be perfect. When it isn't, we wuz robbed. It's all fixed. Change the rules, add another replay camera, have somebody issue a groveling apology.

All these remedies and more have been tried and none have worked. As often happens in human affairs, some remedies have made things worse, particularly instant replay, the most significant effort to make the imperfect perfect.

Human beings screw up no matter how many electronic devices they have to help them. Replay showed Devonta Smith did not make a spectacular catch to set up the Eagles' first touchdown in their NFC title game victory yesterday evening. But 49ers' coach Kyle Shanahan, doubtless dreaming of his opening drive "scheme," failed to throw a challenge flag, and the Eagles got off their next play before the league office in New York wised up. That wasn't the fault of an official making a wrong call of a spectacular bang-bang play. It was the fault of those supposed to correct it.

One of the more pernicious side effects of instant replay is that it has turned many TV fans (the largest group of fans) into rules ninnies. They can see the call, or rather, think they see it. After a dozen slow motion replays of action that took less than a second in real time, every five-beers-in bozo with a five buck bet on the first half over/under is sure he knows what the call should be, or should have been.

Nothing shows this double standard better than the "controversy" over the last play from scrimmage in the Chiefs-Bengals game. Even the most diehard Chiefs fan has compassion for Bengals linebacker Joseph Ossai, who had played an excellent game up until his fatal push on Mahomes, But there are howls that the call was "the refs deciding the game." Of course, as the Lakers-Celtics game showed, if the flag hadn't been thrown, that would've been "the refs deciding the game" too.

Oh, but what about all the calls against Kansas City the refs missed on the play? "So what?" is the only possible answer to that question. News flash: there are likely uncalled fouls on half the plays in every NFL game. For a playoff game, make three out of four. The only way to prevent that would be to have 22 officials, one for every player. There'd be fewer uncalled fouls, although it might get a little crowded out there, particularly in the red zone.

The officials in both conference championships yesterday did not have great games. As happens with players, this was probably the result of pressing. After a bad decision (as with the Eagles' non-catch) or a loss of control by the crew (as when the Chiefs got two third downs in the second half), games tend to become officiated by seven Principal Skinners, as lost in the really complicated rulebook as Shanahan was in his playsheet, missing the forest to throw flags on skinny stunted trees.

That happens. It'll happen again, hopefully not in the Super Bowl. But the call that finally swung the game to the Chiefs was so correct I cannot imagine why it's controversial except for fact one: losing sucks and people have a hard time accepting it.

My former colleague Bob Ryan wrote this decades ago. Bad calls happen. If a bad call costs a team a game, it's its own damn fault for not playing well enough to be ahead by so much a bad call couldn't hurt it.

Shut up and play. Or root. Or bet. But when the topic is the officials, just for the love of sport shut up.

posted by Michael Gee @ 11:30 AM