If The NFL Cared About Its Broken Officiating, It Would Have Fixed It by Now

It's become fairly clear that the officiating crisis we’ve been asking league commissioner Roger Goodell about for years now is simply a beautiful glitch.

Thursday night's game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Baltimore Ravens ended with officiating controversy due to what appeared to be a missed call on the Bengals' final two-point conversion attempt. / Mitch Stringer-Imagn Images

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this was never about controlling a game. This was never about gambling, even though the conspiracies regarding the NFL utilizing its officiating crew as a tool to fix games and skew results in order to protect some online bookmaker are wonderfully entertaining. 

After Thursday night’s Baltimore Ravens–Cincinnati Bengals tilt, a game that ended on a failed two-point conversion attempt by the Bengals in which the quarterback was pawed in the facemask by a defensive lineman and a tight end was being dragged down by a pair of defenders like a 1990s NBA center, it became fairly clear that the officiating crisis we’ve been asking the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell about for years now is simply a beautiful glitch. 

These past few weeks have offered us quite the sample size. Sam Darnold had his helmet turned almost completely backward on Thursday Night Football two weeks ago, triggering a game-ending safety and robbing the Minnesota Vikings of a chance to attempt a 95-yard drive with a little less than two minutes to play. The following weekend, Brian Branch was kicked out of a game for head-to-head contact despite his efforts to turn away, while Xavier Woods was allowed to remain in the Carolina Panthers–New Orleans Saints game earlier in the afternoon for a helmet-to-helmet hit so violent that it placed Chris Olave on a stabilizing board. Jordan Poyer also delivered a nearly identical helmet-to-helmet hit at the end of the Buffalo Bills’ game and was penalized but not ejected. Last month, the final stanza of Bills–New York Jets stood out as one of the most glaring examples of a crew completely losing control of a game. 

We used to be able to tell that the league cared about the perception of its officiating because criticizing officials was verboten. Referees-turned-television-analysts would strain to defend their striped brethren and we’d move on from a bad call like the CIA diverting us from a landing spacecraft. But think about the tonal shift that has taken place in a mere matter of weeks. 

Tom Brady, arguably the most important player in the NFL’s history and all-time highest-paid broadcaster on the telecast after the Branch ejection: “I don’t love that call at all. Obviously it’s a penalty, but to me, there has to be serious intent in a game like this.” (He was not penalized or fined for saying this). 

Dan Campbell, head coach of the Detroit Lions on the Branch ejection: “When you play in prime-time games, New York’s gonna look at all these. They don’t care about the 1 o’clock games. They do those prime-time games. So understand the situation.”

Al Michaels on Thursday Night Football as replays were shown of both the missed facemask and the missed holding calls: “Too many games end this way. They just do. You miss calls. The whole thing. So frustrating for the fans. So frustrating.” 

Branch was among those at the center of an officiating controversy during the first half of the 2024 NFL season. / Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images

It’s hard not to think that once the NFL was able to simply move on from Nickell Robey-Coleman literally upending a Saints receiver via helmet-to-helmet collision with no intent to avoid—a no-call that cost New Orleans a chance of going to the Super Bowl—the league confronted the mounting impossibility of correctly officiating a game without the constant aid of a skyjudge with shrugged shoulders.

The beauty, from their perspective, is that it’s simply another layer of the NFL’s relentless assault on our daily consciousness. We’ve seen how successful the all-attention-is-good-attention theory has been in all walks of life and it remains an incredibly successful formula for a league that has only gotten more popular through one supposed crisis after another. 

When Goodell, during his Tonight Show–style interview with reporters at this past year’s Super Bowl casually praised the job of his officials, it should have told us all we needed to know. The NFL doesn’t care that it’s broken, because we’re all going to talk about how broken it is and then tune in to see if anything has been done about the utter brokenness. 

If a new iPhone exploded during a shareholder meeting, one would assume that the company’s CEO would treat this issue with some sense of urgency because of the stakes. Exploding iPhones make less money. So, you lash out at the creators. You issue a public apology. Or, you simply assume the position of a person doing something about it to make us all feel better. Because, technically, there’s a chance we would buy some other kind of nonexploding phone. 

The NFL knows we’re not going anywhere and, in some twisted way, probably knows how much we enjoy freaking out about the high-profile instances of officiating ineptitude. Thursday night’s no-calls on the Bengals’ two-point conversion will lead every sports talk show on Friday. Bill Belichick, who commented on the Branch penalty during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, will probably weigh in on officiating again, a tiny, aggregatable tidbit that gives this whole confusing mess a longer lifespan than a fruit fly. That’s the only reasonable explanation that doesn’t involve us cross-checking controversial flags with FanDuel props, anyway. 

It mirrors the approach Jerry Jones has taken to the Dallas Cowboys, in which he seems to delight in, or artfully tolerate, the diminishing state of the franchise as he pours himself into other money-making opportunities tangentially related to the product he’s supposed to be upkeeping. His greatest achievement is building a monolith so infallible that we’ll continue hurling money at it no matter how much it disappoints us. Same for a league that just watched another prime-time game that some corporation paid billions of dollars to air end via their inability to uphold the rules that they, themselves, have written and hired the officials to enforce. 

If Goodell and the owners cared, something would have been done about it by now. If we cared enough, we’d have stopped watching already.

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