Block & Tackle is John Teti’s column about pro football.
Monday Night Football commentator Mike Tirico closed his broadcast of the New England Patriots’ 20-13 victory over the Buffalo Bills this week by complaining about the referees. “What a screwed-up night of plays and officiating this was. Wow. Again, on a Monday,” he muttered. Apparently Tirico took special offense that so many recent foulups have happened on his watch, preferring that the referees would save their garbage calls for, say, Jim Nantz and his rinky-dink Thursday night operation over at NFL Network.
Tirico had reason to be annoyed, as the game was marred by two officiating screwups by referee Gene Steratore’s crew. The first and most embarrassing error came in the third quarter when an inadvertent whistle cut short a New England offensive play. Aside from forgetting to wear pants, a mistaken whistle is the most embarrassing error an official can make, which is why the league places signs in the officials’ locker rooms that read, “REMEMBER PANTS.”
Monday night’s erroneous tweet was compounded by confusion over the timing of the whistle and a rare sideline-interference penalty against Bills coach Rex Ryan. (That foul was justified, as Ryan’s obstruction of line judge Gary Arthur—who lost sight of the play and blew the whistle—set the whole mess into motion.) And Steratore’s hodgepodge of rulings emerged only after discussions among his colleagues that were reminiscent of the Yalta Conference, except longer and with somewhat less Stalin.
Still, stray whistles happen, and ESPN’s Sport Science argued that the officials’ cavalcade of screwups ended up giving New England the same approximate field position that the team would have achieved anyway. The more substantial (if less spectacular) injustice occurred on the game’s final play, when Buffalo receiver Sammy Watkins caught a pass and fell backward onto the sideline with two seconds remaining. Even though Watkins got out of bounds, head linesman Ed Walker swung his arm to signal that the clock should keep running. The game ended, denying Buffalo a last-gasp play from midfield to potentially tie the score.
Afterward, Steratore told the press that the clock continued to run because Watkins was judged to have “given himself up” on the field of play—he supposedly hit the ground to declare himself down, in essence, before reaching the boundary. This reasoning was so ridiculous that it was deemed “not plausible” by CBS rules analyst Mike Carey, who knows an implausible explanation of an NFL play when he hears and/or provides one.
These bizarre mishaps come in the wake of an uncalled illegal-bat penalty that doomed the Lions in Week 4 and an inexplicable theft of 18 seconds from the Steelers the following week. Tirico’s Garfield-esque plaint, “Again, on a Monday,” implies a belief that the Monday Night Football tradition is being sullied by these errors. But in a way, the clumsy officiating complements the modern-day MNF, which is the shaggiest pro football broadcast on national TV.
Take the graphics. I detailed some of the problems with ESPN’s information design in a column earlier this year, and the visuals haven’t gotten any better. Like the inane presentation in the above clip, which goes all Michael Bay in an attempt to gussy up a boring statistic (one that Tirico unaccountably describes as “the real Hall Of Fame”). It’s bad enough when the first couple gigantic quarterbacks rumble from the earth, but then Brett Favre’s holy likeness erects itself and, in the process, appears to decapitate and carve up four unsuspecting New England fans: