From Their Lips To Our Ears

August 19, 2010 – Either NFL referee Jeff Triplette, or someone in his crew, salted the airways with invective aimed at the replay official upstairs at the Steelers opening pre-season game against the Lions. “It’s raining like this, I’ll kick his ass, (followed by a string of expletives),” the saturated someone in the crew said near the open microphone. “He’s trying to get to the Super Bowl already,” the voice continued, as rain poured down on Heinz Field. The play in question had to do with Steelers QB Dennis Dixon’s scoring try. Apparently, Triplette wanted to just give Dixon the six points, even though the replay showed a knee down short of the goal line, if not Dixon fumbling into the end zone, which would have resulted in the Lions being awarded the ball.

The calls by Triplette and his crew were dubious even before the rains came, and may be a harbinger for what’s to come from the refs in 2010. A lazy effort, swathed in the crew’s personality playing an influencing role in the game, in this case–’preseason games aren’t worthy of getting the calls right, if it’s at the cost of keeping us dry.’

Lions LT Jeff Backus was pancaked and then called by Triplette for, of all things, tripping, negating a big Lion gain, even though Backus was so dominated by the rush that he wasn’t exactly in control enough to trip. Triplette was the only one tripping on the play.

If biased judgemental blunders aren’t enough, an extra official is now allowed to monitor the trenches from behind the backfield, a place once solely reserved only for the head ref. This move undoubtedly will increase the occurence of holding calls and further dull the game.

This leads into ESPN’s recent scientific study over the last few weeks about close umpire calls being wrong 20% of the time, after further review. The folks at ESPN sold this as news and didn’t do a great job qualifying the study, other than confusing the stats with what amounted to “ties” and a random testing period. Somehow this may or may not have helped the purists strengthen their “human element” defense. We just keep wondering why every game seems to have an instance where the ump gets it wrong and people would rather try and make what’s wrong be regarded as right, instead of utilizing technology to correct the situation.