NFL Breaks Up Pete Morelli's Entire Officiating Crew After Bizarrely Terrible Season

There really is no way to describe Pete Morelli’s 2015 season other than as a nightmare. Blown calls—lots of them, and in very visible situations—led to the Morelli crew unsurprisingly being left out of the postseason, and now the league has come down with its strongest censure short of termination: it’s reassigned every member of the crew.

Football Zebras has the 2016 crew rosters (Three new officials! One retirement! You could at least try to look excited.) and none of the seven-person crew will be working together this year. As Ben Austro explains in the comments on that post, this is a pretty typical NFL move for underperforming officials, in the hopes of either shaking them up or identifying the ones whose performance remains subpar across crews.

Morelli’s 2015 crew’s season was pretty inexplicable. They granted the Lions a timeout they didn’t have. They stole a down from the Cardinals, and later lost track of downs altogether. They missed a false start that would have sealed a Ravens win in a game they went on to lose. They stole 18 seconds from the Steelers’ two-minute drill.

Morelli is one of the most respected refs in the NFL, measured both by grades and by the opinions of his peers, so I doubt he completely lost his mojo in a single year. That means the pressure’s really on his former crew members now.