Football is becoming harder and harder to watch . The refs inject themselves every week . Add on all the betting services that are sponsors it makes you wonder if the fix is in on some of these games . Just my opinion. That’s why I hate commenting on games now a days because to me it’s like commenting on how hulk hogan beat Andre the giant
I think I'm gonna boycott watching the Superbowl for the first time in probably...oh...27 years (when I was 7 years old).
Like, whether the refs are against teams or have biases is a separate debate but what isn't debatable is that the quality of the product has declined substantially. Maybe it's new cameras and replays and angles letting us see just how crappy the refs really are, or maybe the refs are getting worse, but I struggle to remember a game where we couldn't point to either a) a non-or-soft penalty or b) an obvious missed penalty, that didn't impact the outcome of a game.
The Chiefs/Bills game was really bad. Our game was rough but at least the NFL can console themselves with the fact we fumbled 3 times while the game was still within reach, beating ourselves, so that missed hold on the 4th down doesn't loom that large, like it would in, say, a 30-26 game. But the Chiefs/Bills game was rough even on the most basic thing the refs are supposed to do, that is, spotting the damn ball. And that it went against the Bills so often just reinforces the conspiracy theories.
There is zero excuse for the NFL not sticking a few tiny rfid chips in the ends of a football to help with positioning. None. It's super easy. That it hasn't happened just tells us the league doesn't really care about getting even the obvious things right.
Side note, the pushing the ball carrier rules should go back to their pre-2005 incarnation. What we saw yesterday was the natural conclusion of the tush push logic path; team pushes ball carrier, making short yardage situations nearly impossible for defenses to stop without timing it -> defense tries to time it -> offense uses hard count -> defense naturally gets penalized -> can't penalize yardage further in red zone -> defense basically has to give up the TD one way or another.
The fact that no one abused the rules this badly until the Eagles is surprising, but it's clear they're abusing it. There are some "alternative" options, like banning the hard count inside the 5 yard line or something, but that just feels overly complicated. Just go back to pre-2005 rules on pushing the ball carrier and be done with it.
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