Replacement refs? NFL must be joking

(725 words)

The conventions are now history and neither party did a thing to address the looming national crisis that by Monday is destined to plunge the country into a real depression.

Not a financial one.

A football one.

Are you ready for some NFL Replacement Refs football!

It’s a certainty that the dominant Monday storyline of the first week of professional football will be ridiculously blown calls.

Understand, blown calls are a dominant story line every week. No sport suffers more from poor officiating than the NFL.

This is curious because no sport is more over-officiated than the NFL.

Each game is regulated by seven on-field officials and a replay official who has access to 20 different cameras.

That’s almost one official for every two players, all under constant hi-def surveillance.

Felons in our maximum security prisons aren’t as carefully monitored, and these are men who’ve committed rape, murder, assault and various crimes involving narcotics and motor vehicles.

Of course, to be fair to our felons, many of those crimes have been committed by superstar members of the Baltimore Ravens, too, but let’s try to keep this on topic.

Over-officiating wouldn’t bother me if it led to correct calls in a timely manner. It never does.

It’s infuriating to sit at home or, worse, in freezing rain in an $86 stadium seat for upwards of three static minutes watching the referees confer and then -- whoops! -- blow the call.

They say a ball’s not a fumble when replays clearly show it boing-boing-boinging along the turf, that a backward pass actually traveled forward, or that a malicious Cro-Magnon lineman is innocent of clotheslining a precious quarterback when we can all see his severed head spinning there along the sidelines.

Instant replay has made the on-field officials incapable of making firm calls on obvious infractions.

I thought I came up with the perfect solution last year: First, get rid of instant replay and all but two officials -- one for the offense, one for the defense -- and ask the players to agree to play under the honor system.

That means if a player commits a foul, he needs to raise his hand and confess his infraction. Then he needs to apologize to the player he’s victimized while one of the two referees steps off the penalty yardage.

I’m baffled that the NFL, an organization that earns in excess of $9 billion a year, is risking the integrity of its game and the safety of its players in a dispute that amounts to chump change.

Many casual fans are surprised to learn regular refs are part-timers. They spend their work week practicing law, teaching school and doing a variety of regular Joe jobs (I found no evidence any of them works in optometric fields).

Why anyone would want to officiate NFL games as a sort of hobby is a mystery. Death threats over blown calls aren’t uncommon. I guess the Kevlar body suits needed to join the local bomb squads are just too uncomfortable.

So the NFL’s too cheap to invest in more professional refereeing, blown calls are rampant, and the expensive games keep getting longer and longer.

What are we going to do?

Call Enrico Palazzo!

He was the combination opera singer/home plate umpire who saved the day in Leslie Nielsen’s “The Naked Gun” (1988). He didn’t just call balls and strikes.

He goosed the players. He played to the crowd. He moonwalked.

The game he umped was one of the most entertaining sporting events I’ve ever witnessed -- and that’s not even counting the part where he heroically stopped Reggie Jackson’s attempted assassination of Queen Elizabeth.

Clown NFL umpires could entertain the crowd during the interminable time when the ball’s not in play.

Fact: every NFL games includes just about 11 minutes of the actual action. The remainder of the afternoon is just a bunch of people watching a bunch of guys mostly just standing around -- as good an excuse to guzzle $8 domestic beers as any.

A squad of bumbling Enrico Palazzos would enliven the often tedious day.

The Catholic Church takes itself less seriously than the NFL. It could use some levity.

Clown refs would be hilarious.

Funnier even than the joke the NFL’s about to force us all to witness Sunday afternoon.

Related

• Solution to NFL over-officiating: armless linemen!

• NFL not rich enough: Needs ‘throwforward’ jerseys

Re-run Sunday! NFL throwback jerseys (from 2009)

Posting four or five fresh blogs a week is making me less and less reluctant about trotting out some oldies, but goodies on days when I don't feel like doing a thing.

My lazy meters are all flashing red today. So here's a still-relevant post from December 2009 originally titled, "NFL not rich enough: Needs 'Throwforward jerseys.'"

Have a wonderful Sunday! Please check out the blog Monday morning when I'm planning on writing a post featuring the word "sockdologizing." And if that doesn't make you look forward to starting out the new week, nothing will!

My life curse is that I, a man who can’t even earn a dime for himself, sees how the already filthy rich can grab even more loot.

Take this past weekend. I spent $75 to attend a professional football game between my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens.

Now, when it comes to brazen money-grubbing organizations, the National Football League has few rivals. Already awash in billions in profits, the ownership continues to find new and creative ways to squeeze money from their diehard fans.

They think nothing of charging attending fans $50 to park, $7.50 for 12 ounces of lite beer, insist we pay full price for meaningless pre-season games, and hold entire cities hostage by enforcing cruel TV blackouts if the stadiums don’t sell out.

They showed their contempt for fans on Christmas when they scheduled an 8 p.m. game between the Tennessee Titans and the San Diego Chargers. Fans in Nashville had to choose between leaving home and hearth on the holiest day of the year or sitting outside in near freezing temperatures to watch professional football.

So the stadium was about half empty. More and more fans with better and better big screen TVs are wisely opting to stay home.

That’s why an increasing number of games are being broadcast on the premium cable channel, The NFL Network. If fewer people are going to attend the games, they need to make money off those who like to watch it at home.

Pay-per-view professional football, brought to you by The NFL Network, is already here.

So why would I bother trying to make such a greedy, nefarious organization even more money? I guess I just can’t help myself so here goes:

The NFL needs to start selling replica Throwforward uniforms.

That’s a term you’ve never heard before. But most fans have certainly heard of the obnoxious Throwback uniforms.

Once nearly every fan in America had purchased for about $250 an authentic replica NFL-issued jersey of their favorite team, the NFL realized the apparel market was saturated.

So in a greedy panic they turned on a time machine and began forcing teams to wear throwback jerseys from the olden days. That way the truly obsessed fan would need to spend another $250 for a jersey that represented their team in, say, the 1930s. Then the 1940s. Then the 1950s, and so on.

And here’s the thing: the uniforms are uniformly hideous. I’ve seen plenty of archival pre-1970s footage of professional jerseys. In faded black and white photographs, the uniforms appear drab.

It gives the impression that our ancestors grew up in a time when no one smiled and everyone wore hand-me downs from folks with the fashion sense of bitter Pilgrims.

But when our favorite teams raced out onto the field wearing their throwback jerseys we were stunned to learn we were wrong.

Our ancestors weren’t boring. They were insane.

The jerseys had psychedelic stripes, odd insignia and bewildering color schemes that jarred the senses. It’s a shameless marketing ploy that interferes with the enjoyment of the game.

The genius of the Throwforward jersey is that NFL flacks could unveil jerseys that will be worn by the home team in, say, the year 2029.

It would let daffy fans of teams like the perennially hapless Miami Dolphins delude themselves into thinking that maybe by then -- cross your fingers -- the Dolphins will be competitive.

And the best thing from the NFL perspective is that they’ll be able to justify charging $1,250 per jersey because that’s what the actual price will likely be in the year 2029.

So there you have it. Throwback. Throwforward. For an increasing number of disgusted fans like me, there’s only one direction we feel like throwing any more.

And that’s up.

Seeing red over NFL pink

A flamboyant shade is making an unwelcome intrusion amidst all the splendid fall foliage.

It’s pink and it’s everywhere. It’s on buildings, advertisements and all over every aspect of the televised extravaganzas that make up the manly broadcasts involving the NFL.

Has anyone else noticed this or am I the only one?

Of course you have and of course you know the reason why.

The panoply of pink is in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It is the third leading killer cancer (second is colorectal whose awareness month is March, by the way). The National Cancer Institute says about 40,000 women will die from breast cancer this year.

I remember being devastated 30 years ago when my Mom was diagnosed. It was a grim 18 months of fears, false hopes and tenuous success that cost her both her breasts. She’s been cancer-free ever since.

So please believe me when I say I adore breasts and the women who sport them.

What I despise is symbolism.

And the epidemic of pink infuriates me because it allows people who should be doing more to fool people into thinking they’re doing anything.

Of course, I’m thinking primarily of the craven greed maestros who run the NFL.

They dress their players, their coaches, their referees, their goal posts and every aspect of their telecasts in pink. There are pink towels, pink cleats, pink hats and pink jerseys you can purchase with the proper credit card at NFLSHOP.com

Understand, this isn’t about women’s health. This is purely about marketing.

This is part of the NFL scheme to feminize our most masculine game. They’re eager to to cultivate the nearly 50 percent of the population that doesn’t reflexively reach for the remote every Sunday at 1 p.m. Plus, every time they release a new jersey, they know many of their loyal fans will shell out money to buy the trendy new color schemes.

Not wishing to be so cynical, I thought it wise to do a little research before I began tossing around inflammatory accusations about such a sensitive topic.

And I found out I was wrong.

I’m not cynical enough.

See for yourself at www.nfl.com/pink. It has important health messages, but the quoted gist of the month-long program is: “To help support this important cause, purchase your NFL pink merchandise at NFLSHOP.com.”

It says nothing about “a portion of proceeds will go to benefit . . .” or if the NFL will match any donations.

No, the colossal organization that spent the summer childishly arguing about how to divvy up $9.3 billion in revenue wants you to write a check, but seems reluctant to write one of its own.

Rather than a month of garish gridiron pink, I’d prefer seeing Roger Goodell announce, “Today the NFL owners and players together presented the American Cancer Society with a check for $50 million. We are asking the companies that run beer, car and sneaker commercials during our broadcasts to do the same.”

I guess I’m just like Cosmo Kramer from “Seinfeld.” And, really, the parallels are many. We’re both terrific mooches, devote our days to harebrained schemes and skate through life without any visible means of support.

But I’m talking primarily about our refusal to wear the ribbon. It nearly cost Kramer his life in the 1995 episode “The Sponge.”

He generously devotes his morning to an AIDS walk, but begs off when he’s asked to wear the AIDS ribbon. Whether it’s for reasons of fashion or if, like me, he has a philosophical aversion to symbolic gestures, it doesn’t say.

All we see is that two militant gay men named Cedric and Bob attack Kramer for refusing to wear the ribbon.

At least I’m inferring they’re militant gays. That too is left unsaid. All we know is the men act like an affectionate couple, are ribbon bullies and in a previous episode showed an affinity for Elaine’s antique armoire.

And when they find out Kramer won’t wear the ribbon they go medieval on his ass.

I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. And I wouldn’t want to slight anyone who may be going through the very real tribulations of breast cancer.

I just want everyone to understand nothing’s really being done about breast cancer just because Steeler coach Mike Tomlin wears a ballcap with pink accents.

I’ll be more impressed when October is more about giving the green than wearing the pink.