Several big-time shot-callers in the NFL are now Very Concerned about the state of officiating in the league based on the performance of Craig Wrolstad’s crew in Week 18’s game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Seattle Seahawks. Seattle won that game 19-16 in overtime, and the result put the Seahawks in the playoffs, knocking the Detroit Lions out even before Detroit’s Sunday night game against the Green Bay Packers.
Multiple executives and coaches told ESPN’s Adam Schefter that the officiating had several lapses, all in Seattle’s favor, and all key elements in Seattle’s eventual win.
One anonymous source said that it was “The worst officiated game of the year.”
Schefter wrote that it wasn’t just the Rams and the Lions who were upset by the officiating in this particular game — the NFL’s Competition Committee also stood up and took notice.
From Schefter’s report:
One source told ESPN this week that the NFL must do a better job of screening, hiring and training its officials; the league can’t have games in which teams’ seasons are on the line and have questionable and impactful calls such as the ones in the Rams-Seahawks Week 18 game.
Officiating is an imperfect science, but the source said to ESPN that there should be ways to mitigate those types of mistakes.
All true, but where has this outrage been all season? NFL officiating has been a major problem all along, and Week 18 wasn’t the worst week. Not even close. You can go back to Week 15, when multiple crews blew multiple calls that affected games to various degrees.
There were the two fumble recovery touchdowns by Minnesota Vikings cornerback Chandon Sullivan that were called back — the only reason those didn’t affect Minnesota’s eventual win over the Indianapolis Colts is that the Vikings performed the greatest comeback win in NFL history.
There was the touchdown pass from Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Derek Carr to receiver Keelan Cole late in the Raiders’ game against the New England Patriots that shouldn’t have been a touchdown upon review — Cole’s second foot went out of bounds, but the crew didn’t see sufficient evidence to overturn the touchdown call — even though there was ample evidence on the FOX television replays.
And there were the series of officiating bungles that helped the New York Giants beat the Washington Commanders — primarily an obvious and missed pass interference penalty on New York cornerback Darnay Holmes — which referee John Hussey referred to as a “judgment call.”
Talk about a series of officiating decisions that affected playoff seedings? The 9-7-1 Giants wound up with the NFC’s six-seed, while the 8-8-1 Commanders were not in the postseason. Had Washington won that game, they would have flipped records with the Giants, and as the teams’ tie game was against each other, that’s another example of officiating deciding in part who gets to play in the tournament.
We have horrible roughing the passer penalties just about every week, based on rules that are flawed by design. We have officials who are confused about which team they want to penalize. And we have a VP of Officiating in former referee Walt Anderson who tends to take over postgame pool reports, leaving the officials in question to skate without any real public accountability.
So, it’s nice that some people in the league are concerned about the state of officiating as the postseason begins. Not that it will have any effect on the quality of work this weekend and beyond, but our question is: Where has this concern been all season? Because what happened in the Seahawks-Rams game was more par for the course than any kind of outlier in performance.
