2023 Season | Week 7 | Gameday Chatter Thread | Bye | 10/22/2023

[Genghis Khan]

Yea I'm not saying there is definitely a conspiracy, maybe there is, maybe there isn't. What I know for a fact is that the officiating is horrendous, has an outsized impact on games, and it only seems to be getting worse as the years go on.

Whether or not there is some sort of conspiracy is just background noise and relatively unimportant to the core issue. With that said, I don't blame anybody for believing in it being a conspiracy given how consistently bad it is.

Exactly how I feel.

 

[bbgun]

 

[Bill Shatner]

Yeah, you get that sense, huh?

It's almost like maybe our FO should be doing their fucking jobs and working the phones.

The sense I get is that they like to kick back their feet on their yachts, yuck it up in the suite on gameday, and that the rest of the league thinks they are smelly assholes and so deals don't often get done.

What? that 5th for Cooper still not doing it for anyone? And the treasure they turned that pick into..... A who gives a shit, always hurt OT from bum fucked somewhere.

 

[NoDak]

Way easier to "miss" making a call. They can claim they just didn't see it. Look at all the holds that go uncalled. Both offensive and defensive. The missed facemasks. Olinemen leaving early. Etc...

Shit, that Dolphin WR nearly had his head taken off against the Eagles the other night. How in the hell could that be missed. The ref was running along with them, supposedly watching them. Or at least he should have been, since that's where the play was happening.

 

[Smitty]

He's the cautionary tale for moving on from Dak though.

The Redskins still haven't replaced Cousins and it was a massive mistake to let him go instead of paying him. And that's despite the fact that Cousins is good not great.

It's really really hard to find even a good QB.

Yeah but they haven’t really tried.

 

[Smitty]

Let's see. There are 8 officials on each crew, 13 games per week. So that means a total of 104 officials would have to part of the effort to tilt games in favor one team or another. The NFL Employee Directory lists 6,005 employees (worldwide), so you have to figure a few hundred of them would be in on it. There are 17 staffers from the League Operations, some of whom oversee officiating, so they'd have to be part of rigging games as well.

And yet all these people, possibly hundreds of them, would keep this whole grand scheme secret?

All 104 officials would have to meet before games and agree not to throw flags on certain teams, or throw more flags against certain other teams, and not one of them would ever breathe a word of it?

Really?

Nope, never said any of that.

I never even said it was a scheme at all.

 

[Smitty]

Not really. You make it into a giant conspiracy. A bias is what I think we are all talking about. No different then an official trying to keep a game competitive with his calls because he thinks it will keep his boss happy. No meeting required. Just one official on any given day being a normal human being.

Let’s see.

A referee in the NBA was proven to be cheating.

This dolt wants to tell us it can’t happen in the NFL right after gambling becomes legalized.

 

[Smitty]

Yea I'm not saying there is definitely a conspiracy, maybe there is, maybe there isn't. What I know for a fact is that the officiating is horrendous, has an outsized impact on games, and it only seems to be getting worse as the years go on.

Whether or not there is some sort of conspiracy is just background noise and relatively unimportant to the core issue. With that said, I don't blame anybody for believing in it being a conspiracy given how consistently bad it is.

I would be shocked if there wasn’t a conspiracy on some level, that is to say, someone at some level of power has the ability to alter outcomes and is utilizing that power; and some one else knows about it and has assisted at least in the covering up.

It absolutely doesn’t have to be all the refs or anything close to it like this guy tries to imply.

Like, if another ref knew what the NBA guy was doing and helped keep it quiet, I call that conspiracy. That’s definitely happening in the NFL on some level, we would be naive to think there isn’t any fixing. There are billions of dollars at stake. Newsflash: lots of people are cheating. Including some of the teams (Belichick and Brady, for example).

 

[Smitty]

I think NFL football is an incredibly difficult sport to officiate, much more so than the other sports, so I can't comment on the quality. I'm not qualified, and I doubt very much whether anyone on this board is. And because the officials are human beings, there will be mistakes. I do know that in the games I watch, much of the time the TV cameras support what the call is. Instant Replays sustain far more calls than they reverse.

But quality and consistency are issues of human error. They're very different from allegations that refs are secretly and deliberately making calls that benefit one team over another.

The Cowboys lead the league in offsides calls with nine, tied for 10th in false starts. Those are objective calls, the infraction is obvious. That's not the refs, that's the players. Poor discipline and lack of focus.

Maybe other teams commit fewer penalties because the players are held accountable. Who knows?

The Cowboys are 10th in winning percentage over the last 20 years. So if the refs are trying to screw them, they're doing a shitty job. And doing a much better job of screwing 22 other teams.

So many false conclusions drawn, easier to completely flush

 

[Smitty]

Way easier to "miss" making a call. They can claim they just didn't see it. Look at all the holds that go uncalled. Both offensive and defensive. The missed facemasks. Olinemen leaving early. Etc...

Shit, that Dolphin WR nearly had his head taken off against the Eagles the other night. How in the hell could that be missed. The ref was running along with them, supposedly watching them. Or at least he should have been, since that's where the play was happening.

Right, they just “missed” it. Did this ref ever breathe a word about his deliberate “misses” to another ref while hanging out together in private? Conspiracy!

It would be unbelievable that it doesn’t happen.

 

[Couchcoach]

Yeah but they haven’t really tried.

Agreed!
Resigning Dak keeps us a wildcard team, nothing more. So, do we take that road and accept the fact that we're going to be an average/above average team? Or do we let Dak walk and start all over? Maybe we hit, maybe we miss. I'm all for getting serious in the draft and moving on from Dak, sooner rather than later.

 

[Genghis Khan]

Resigning Dak keeps us a wildcard team, nothing more.

Dak has won the division 3 times.

Now if you want to say their ceiling is the division round, that might be true and has been true for almost three decades.

 

[Genghis Khan]

Oh, and as frustrating as losing in the division round is, I'll take that a thousand times out of a thousand over being the Redskins after Cousins left. They've tried 1st round picks, they've tried mid round picks, they've tried FAs, they've tried UDFAs.

Turns out it's actually very hard to find a good QB.

I definitely agree that Dak has flaws, but I genuinely believe we can win with him and this defense if we have a strong running game. We've been stubbornly dumb about the running game the past couple years.

 

[Smitty]

Oh, and as frustrating as losing in the division round is, I'll take that a thousand times out of a thousand over being the Redskins after Cousins left. They've tried 1st round picks, they've tried mid round picks, they've tried FAs, they've tried UDFAs.

Turns out it's actually very hard to find a good QB.

I definitely agree that Dak has flaws, but I genuinely believe we can win with him and this defense if we have a strong running game. We've been stubbornly dumb about the running game the past couple years.

Citing the worst case scenario from a team that has been mismanaged more than we have, isn’t really a compelling argument not to take a risk.

 

[son of deadrise]

I stand corrected. From USA Today:

Brad Allen's officiating crew was a one-sided farce in Eagles-Dolphins

Brad Allen's officiating crew was a one-sided farce in Eagles-Dolphins

 

[boozeman]

 

[son of deadrise]

I'll admit to diminished competence, I'll admit to bias. The Eagles/Dophins article pretty much proves that.

But the bias in the USA Today article is on the part of one crew, and in favor of home teams.

What I won't admit to is a league-wide conspiracy to slant the officiating against certain teams.

 

[boozeman]

I'll admit to diminished competence, I'll admit to bias. The Eagles/Dophins article pretty much proves that.

But the bias in the USA Today article is on the part of one crew, and in favor of home teams.

What I won't admit to is a league-wide conspiracy to slant the officiating against certain teams.

Glad to see a USA Today article could turn you around, amigo.

 

[Chocolate Lab]

What I won't admit to is a league-wide conspiracy to slant the officiating against certain teams.

Take the Cowboys out of it. What about the Raiders leading the league in penalties all those years when Al was in litigation with them? Total coincidence?

And to add, I'm not a conspiracy guy really. I'm just frustrated that officiating is so uneven and that there are so many flags in general, because it ruins the flow of the game.

But I will point out again an interview I heard with the Papa Johns guy saying that Goodell was well known to be very petty and extremely vindictive against anyone he even perceived as crossing or challenging him.

 

[shoop]

Conspiracy or not it is obviously a flawed system that has potential solutions. Not to take advantage of them or try to improve such an important part of the game is negligent.