Referees
I thought I’d spend a few minutes today on a total side-topic from our regular federal budget woes, Obama’s complete amateurism in foreign policy* (and claiming that Romney & Ryan have less experience), sequestration, and all that other nonsense to talk FOOTBALL!
GorT is a fan of a number of professional league sports Football, Soccer (particularly English Premier League and the Euro Cup…although I’ve been known to flip on a Women’s College game here and there), and NHL Hockey. We can save the debates over which sports is the &#@@AWESOMEST#!@!@ and for the sake of the remainder of this post, let’s leave out the your-team-sucks types of dialog.
In each of these sports, and many others, referees generally bear a brunt of complaints – missed calls, favoring one team or the other, etc. and in some cases this is well justified. GorT was a certified referee in college for a major university’s intramural program. I refereed flag football, basketball, and soccer. As part of the certification training you learn quickly that you need to make a judgement call quickly and with conviction. Refs who take too long or are weak-kneed when challenged about their call tend to be discounted and not believed. At the pace of the games, particularly football and basketball – but even soccer for an offsides call – the referee has about 1.5 seconds to evaluate what he or she sees, determine the proper call, and signal/flag the call with the appropriate action (whistle, flag, arm gesture, etc.). I continue to referee to this day in our kids’ school’s intramural flag football program and the same rules apply.
I present all of this solely to focus on the Redskins vs. Rams NFL game from yesterday afternoon. Excerpts from this game should be required watching for referee training. Look, I know that these are replacement referees but they have experience refereeing football games. The league should have provided them resources, maybe to include consultants available on headsets, for making the appropriate calls (not in real time, but if a procedural question arose). These referees let the game get out of control and made some terrible calls against and for both teams. I wouldn’t argue that one team or the other benefited from their performance but rather, their performance was just plain poor.
It was clear from the players on the field – especially London Fletcher, Steven Jackson, and Josh Morgan, among others – that they were feeling the frustration with the referees. Rarely have I seen referees allow the kind of contact, pushing, etc. on touchbacks – particularly by the Rams players against the Redskins. By not asserting control with simple things like this, it escalates into the various frakases (fraki ?) that erupted throughout the game.
I’m not educated enough on the referee strike and the demands that are being set forth, but much like the Chicago schoolchildren are the ones being hurt by the CTU strike, the viewers and even the players are the ones getting hurt by the NFL Referee strike.
GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.