I thought the officiating looked great last in Baltimore. It gave me the feeling of the Principal returning after the students took over his office for a few days. Order, calmness and maturity returned. That ref was one of the NFL's best.
ESPN seems infatuated with Ed Hochuli so for whatever it's worth, they announced that the Bengals will get him this week in Jacksonville. I think Ed's pretty good but there are others I'd rank above him
Hochuli is known because of his physique and his drawn out explanations of penalties I think. I could be wrong.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
The Saints/ Pack game may have had more blown calls than any of the replacement games.....pretty scary.
Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand
The NFL has done a poor job of getting rid of its poor refs and replacing them with better refs. They say they have a ranking system that downgrades crews and doesn't allow them to work in the post season. That fine and dandy but it still doesn't prevent bad officials from working key games.
A big pet peeve of mine is with the explosion of the NFL the refs have become sideshows themselves. When a guy like Ed Hochuli is known for his biceps or his first down calls I have an issue with it. The greatest compliment you can give a ref is you didn't notice him on the field. The NFL head refs almost been branding themselves lately instead of worrying about their profession.
I would argue that the block/charge in hoops is as hard if not harder to call. Also, pass interference can have a bigger impact on an individual play, but in basketball, a ref's choices on a 50/50 call can actually force a coach to remove a player from the game. The only thing that is even close is soccer with the card system.
Variatio delectat - Cicero
I agree.
Granted--and I've stated this previously--a team (Football or Basketball) simply needs to score enough points when it has a chance, not leaving the outcome up to the Officials. That stated, Sea Ray's point about counting off the correct yardage and getting the amount of timeouts correct is spot-on. There is no excuse in either case.
IMHO, for the reasons/situations that Improbus presented, I firmly believe that Officials are more likely to be in a position to influence the outcome of a Basketball game more often than a Football game. Again, that is just a personal opinion.
Whatever you do, do your best to not allow the struggles of life to interfere with the pleasures of living.
To back up my point of NFL officials becoming celebrities Ed Hochuli is on the cover of SI.
The two things that the NFL officials do better is keep the flow of the game going and have a firm knowledge of the rules. For the most part I don't think the replacement refs made any more questionable or awful calls than the usual refs do. They did let the game get out of control at times and didn't understand some of small intricacies of the rules.
Green Bay can't blame the replacement refs if they miss the playoffs anymore.
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