Anyone that has had the pleasure of talking about sports with me knows a few things. First, that I am very passionate about sports. The teams that I root for, or claim as 'my team' are very dear to me. I am not a fair weather fan by any means. I support my team through the bad years and the good. 20 years of being a fan of the New Orleans Saints and Utah Jazz should prove that point.
Another thing you should know about me is that I take sports very seriously, and hate when teams, owners and commisioners try and cut corners to save money, lie about making the game better and single out teams for crimes that everyone is committing.
I hate lock outs, wether its the players or owners fault, I hate teams selling/trading their best pieces and getting nothing back in return.
And I hate replacement officiating.
I've hated it from the pre-season.
I knew it was going to be a disaster. I knew that multiple calls were either going to be called wrong, or not called at all. I knew players, coaches and fans were going to be upset. But the owners, they'd be ok with it. After all, the NFL is a multi billion dollar behemoth. It makes so much money because the product is so good and fun to watch. The owners knew that fans would still go to games at the stadiums, and still watch on sundays. The owners knew they would still make money off of the fans, even though the officiating would be subpar to say the least.
What the owners didn't know or expect was the aftermath of monday nights game. Many people said that eventually, these replacement refs would cost one team a victory. Luckily for us it game this early in the season.
As of right now, news is that a new agreement is being finished and that the new refs will be officiating tonights game. They will be a little slow and behind as this is their first game, but it will still be better than what we had before.
It took a giant mistake to get this deal done. It took a day that was filled with news about this one blown call. Constant replays, discussions, arguments and frustrating rants was everywhere on the news on tuesday. And it wasn't just on ESPN. National news had tons of coverage on this, even President Obama chimed in on the subject.
This is what had to happen for the NFL to get this deal done. And its lucky that it happened this early. Many fans had either stopped watching, thought about stop watching, or were about to stop watching even before the fiasco on monday occured. I was one of these fans.
After watching some games on sunday afternoon I announced that I was done watching the NFL until the refs are back. I had seen too many games with just bad officiating. Bad calls, no calls, late calls you name it, it happened.
While watching my pathetic Saints lose to the Chiefs I saw multiple no calls for holding, pass interference(offense and defense) and the calls that were made were wrong(on both sides).
This pushed me over the edge. Three weeks of watching this garbage was enough for me to do my part to send the NFL a message. I was going to stop watching the NFL.
I didn't watch the Sunday night game, or the Monday night game. I've seen enough highlights from the games to see how bad the officiating was.
The NFL was always tried to say they stand for integrity. When in reality, they will only stand for integrity when it makes them money.
I am glad the NFL has the refs back. I am unhappy about how it was handled and I don't blame the refs at all. They clearly deserve a pay raise(and a pension fund) as anyone other than these refs is not good enough.
I think Roger Goodell should be on the hot seat as a commisioner. He made the NFL players lockout much more difficulty by trying to blame the players for the lockout, when clearly the owners were greedy. He also tried to save a tiny amount of money on the refs, we are talking about pay raises to 149,000 this season. That's nothing cmpared to the billions of dollars teh NFL brings in.
The NFL is getting harder and harder to watch. And although I am happy the refs are back, I do not have solid faith in the NFL. Not after the two lockouts, the still constant head injuries despite Goodell claiming he is 'worried about player saftey'(and Goodell wanting to go to an 18 game schedule). Not to mention him singleing out specific players and teams for crimes every team committs.
I'm happy to be able to watch the NFL again, but I'm even more happy that I have college football and that the NBA season is only a month away from starting.
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