ONE OF the NFL’s locked-out officials was at home Sunday waiting and watching, like everyone else, for the weekly blooper reel to begin. It does not take long with the replacement officials for the comedy of errors to unfold, although the hilarity went out of this situation last week.
The performance bar was set so low then that the NFL could play limbo with it, but it allowed Sundays games to feel like an improvement because at least it didn’t seem as if brawls were about to erupt across the television screen – until the final game of the night, when officials struggled to control repeated skirmishes between New England and Baltimore. Instead, officials had a problem with which direction the kickoff would go in Dallas, then with an incorrect illegal block call in Minnesota.
You could laugh those off, of course, and maybe you would have if they hadn’t been followed by missed helmet-to-helmet hits on Tony Romo and Darrius Heyward-Bey, and the failure to overturn a call that the Dolphins’ Anthony Fasano had caught a pass near the goal line against the Jets, and the allowing of 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh to twice challenge calls, even though he had used all of his timeouts.
Luckily, none of those mistakes decided the game, although Heyward-Bey was carted off the field. It has gone on like this for three weeks, and it seems inevitable that instead of the officiating improving as expected, it is merely building up to bigger blunders.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Sunday afternoon that he had been told that executives in the league office knew that last week had been a disaster, capped by a Monday night game that nearly tipped out of control, with chippy play, furious coaches and a plodding pace.
The league’s response to seeing players and coaches screaming in disgust was to warn them that they should respect the game and that fines would be coming if the abuse continued.
The league escaped Sunday relatively unscathed, but that doesn’t make this standoff any less irritating. The NFL is used to winning – it bloodied the players during their contract negotiations last year and it even mostly prevailed when it finally made a deal with Time Warner Cable to carry NFL Network last week – and it counted on fans to largely ignore what the league considered just another hard-nosed business negotiation.
But the NFL underestimated the audience and overestimated the replacements. The fans are still watching, to be sure, and in that respect, the league made the correct bet. But the NFL’s carefully maintained sheen loses a bit of luster with each call that has to be overturned and with each extended conference, all because of a dispute over a few million dollars’ worth of retirement benefits.
Sunday night’s match-up between the New England Patriots and the Baltimore Ravens figured to offer a return to normalcy, to the comforts of seeing Tom Brady’s smirk and Ray Lewis’ scowl under a national spotlight. New England’s vaunted offense, which sputtered after Aaron Hernandez was injured in a startling home loss to the Cardinals last week, seemed to regain some of its lustre. And for the second straight week, Baltimore’s defence showed its flaws.
But the Ravens received an inspired performance from their second-year wide receiver, Torrey Smith, who took the field less than 24 hours after his younger brother died in a motorcycle accident. Smith’s brother, Tevin Jones, 19, was killed in Virginia late Saturday.
Smith finished with six catches for 127 yards and two touchdowns, leading Baltimore to a 31-30 victory. A five-yard touchdown catch by Smith – his second of the game – pulled the Ravens to 30-28 with 4:01 left.
The Ravens then forced a New England punt and took possession at their 21-yard line with 1:55 left. The Ravens marched downfield, capping the drive with a 27-yard field goal from Justin Tucker as time expired to take the victory..
New York Times Service
