« Previous entry | Next entry »

After 48 regular season games that nearly brought the National Football League to its knees and turned the league's officiating into a recurring national joke, the NFL and the referees union have agreed to a new eight-year deal and the officials will be back on the job Thursday night in Baltimore.

The replacement officials made many mistakes over the weekend, some of such great consequence that they inspired incredible anger, others bad enough only to prompt a very loud "bullshit" chant. But they've all been bad. Instead of focusing on one specific mistake, or all the mistakes as a whole, though, we want to focus…

What would motivate you to Google "referee?" Nothing good (unless you're counting sexy bedroom role-play costumes, in which case, uh, nothing good). The above Google Trends graph (updated last night) shows the relative frequency of "referee" searches in the United States since 2004. The term tends to spike with…

After the Hall of Fame game in August, Mike Pereira let it slip that Craig Ochoa, the referee who worked that game, had been fired from the Lingerie Football League. The Lingerie Football League—which recently uprooted itself from its US host cities to barnstorm in Canada, the United States, and Australia over the next …

Replacement refs once again became an issue Sunday night, as a controversial illegal contact penalty followed by a rare bench personal foul assessed to the Ravens stirred the M & T Bank Stadium crowd into a rage. Indeed, it nearly sounds as if the entire city of Baltimore is joining in the "Bullshit" chant, one so loud …

After a lousy first week in the NFL, replacement officials again came under fire this weekend following trip-ups, missed calls, and general ineptitude. While Roger Goodell testifies to the NFL's increased emphasis on player safety, his continued lockout of union officials reveals the league really doesn't give a damn …

« Previous entry | Next entry »

« Previous entry | Next entry »

On Aug. 31, just a week or so prior to the kickoff of the new season, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell sent out a "note" to the public that was essentially a press release, a reminder to you, the NFL viewing public, that the league was going balls-out on player safety: