NFL officiating is not good. I don’t think there are many people who would disagree. Observe the fanbase of any single NFL game, and you’ll find—at least—an underbelly of people who believe their team was cheated by the officials. But this isn’t just a bunch of fans viewing the game through a heavily-biased lens, it’s easy to point out a handful of missed calls in nearly every single game. There are at least two or three missed holding calls a game, ticky-tacky pass interference calls are made all of the time, and if you zoom in close enough, you can probably catch an uncalled offsides or two, as well.
Officiating conspiracies are seemingly at an all time high, particularly after Arian Foster joked on a podcast two years ago that the NFL was scripted. And the theories are running wild again this week after the Detroit Lions lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in a game where the Chiefs were only called for a single, declined penalty. That made them the first team since 1972 to complete a game with zero accepted penatlies called on them. As always, some have gone to the tape to point out a handful of “obvious” mistakes the NFL made during the game.
And while some of this can certainly be attributed to the “fanatic” part of fandom, there are at least some out there that are trying to find factual evidence out there of a conspiracy. A recent study from UTEP found that the Chiefs were the unusual beneficiaries of specific penalties at a much higher rate than other teams, using playoff data. Others have countered that the only reason that study used playoff data was because the findings are the exact opposite in the regular season. (Scott Kacsmar has a whole article debunking the Chiefs conspiracy here.)
So that leads to today’s Question of the Day:
Do you think the NFL has an officiating conspiracy?
My answer: You can choose to answer this however you want. Whether you think the league is consciously or unconsciously favoring a team like the Chiefs because they financially benefit from it—or if you think there’s something even more nefarious regarding gambling.
Personally speaking, I interpret bad officiating with the common rule of thumb: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
Officiating is hard. You have to keep your eyes on a million different things and make split-second judgments—often without the benefit of slo-mo replay. No matter how much you pay officials or train them full-time or threaten to fine them, nothing will make officials have the superpower of being able to see everything all at once. The goal is always improvement, but perfection is nowhere near realistic.
And I bet you could find a contingent of fans for all 32 teams that are convinced the refs are out to get them. While Lions fans have their own scars of the batted ball, phantom facemask, 10-second runoffs, and more, every other team has their own laundry list of horror stories about officiating.
So, no. I don’t think there’s an officiating conspiracy. I think refs are just bad at their very difficult jobs.
But I am curious as to what you have to say. Vote in the poll below and share your thoughts in the comment section at the bottom of the page.
