MNF - The Referees got the call Right

The replacement referees for the NFL have taken a huge beating recently over their ability to officiate the game. These guys are new to their job in the national spotlight and the game would be better off if the regular refs were to return sooner rather than later but the most shocking thing we have learned about the absence of the regular referees is that NFL players and coaches are whiny losers.

I take as case in point the Monday Night Football game: Packers at Seahawks.

After the game Aaron Rogers had some very harsh comments for the officials. You could tell that he was upset. I don't blame him. He had just lost a game that he thought he should have won. In fact, Aaron Rogers and the rest of the Packers probably thought that the game shouldn't have even been close. After all, they are perennial favorites to play in the Superbowl and the Seattle Seahawks are a weak west coast team with a college football coach.

Aaron Rogers has a right to be mad but the person he should be mad at is himself. If Superbowl MVP Aaron Rogers wanted to win the game Monday night he should have put more than twelve points on the scoreboard during the previous 59 minutes of the game. He could even have maintained possession of the ball for the remaining seconds of the game. Aaron Rogers had an entire game's worth of opportunities to win the game but he has opted to take the easy way out and blame someone else. Don't talk to me about the integrity of the win if you are willing to blame someone else for your loss.

The other person who should be scrutinized here but hasn't is M.D. Jennings. You can talk all day about Jennings intercepting the ball but if he really had possession of the catch why didn't he walk away with the ball? You can see in the film that he tries to roll away but can't because Golden Tate had a better grip on the ball. Don't tell me you're a big tough football player if you can't come up with the ball.

The last thing I have to say about this play and why everyone else is wrong about it is this: The fraction of a second that Jennings had 'more' possession of the ball than Tate did doesn't count. Simultaneous possession, by definition, must be at about the same time. We can't measure anything with exactness, it all has to be within a certain tolerance. If we look at any two events one must come before the other. In this case the lens of slow motion film has distorted the truth so that we think that a simultaneous catch must happen faster than a few frames of film.

This is a simultaneous catch. The Seahawks won this game fair and square. The media and players have blown this all out of proportion.

The referees got the call right and anyone who thinks otherwise is WRONG.