A few weeks into the 2024 season, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was able to evade a mounting story line from the ’23 season relating to the league’s officiating crisis. After Monday night’s game between the New York Jets and the Buffalo Bills, he no longer has that luxury.
Over the course of 60 minutes in prime time, a bumbling, hyper-sensitive officiating crew hurled 22 flags, many of them in rapid succession from one play to the next. Many of these calls prompted equally horrendous make-up style calls, not to mention what looked to be a botched call on the field that was quickly shut down by booth review, making a desperate coach unable to challenge it (even though that coach was likely prompted to challenge by John Parry, a longtime NFL referee and ESPN’s former in-house rules analyst).
