The NFL is on a heater TV-wise, pacing for its best viewership since 2015. But the referees are threatening to ruin the TV experience.

Too many game telecasts are marred by ticky-tack or questionable calls. There’s no flow, no pace, because they’re constantly interrupted by thrown flags.

It’s a sad state of affairs when everyone from announcers to viewers are conditioned to hold their breath and wait for the flag after every big play. Will it take another “Fail Mary” embarrassment on national TV to spur changes?

Troy Aikman of ESPN was previously one of the few analysts willing to call out zebras. But things are so far gone that many respected NFL voices can’t ignore it any longer. 

Take the Eagles’ 16–9 win over the Lions on NBC’s Sunday Night Football—please. Philadelphia iced the game after the refs made a truly “terrible” pass interference call, declared NBC game analyst Cris Collinsworth.

NBC replays showed Detroit cornerback Rock Ya-Sin hand-fighting with Philadelphia’s A.J. Brown—but nothing worth a pass interference. As a former WR himself, you’d think Collinsworth would have been on Brown’s side. Instead, he went off on the call.

“Oh, come on! Come on! That is terrible! That is an absolutely terrible call that’s going to decide this football game! If anything, it’s an offensive push,” said an exasperated Collinsworth. “I said offensive foul … if you want to call it, it’s an offensive foul. Wow.”

“It’s certainly hand-fighting, but not even at the level we’ve seen,” added play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico. “Rock Ya-Sin thought it may have been going the other way as well. He played a good game tonight.”

Kurt Warner serves as a game analyst for the league’s own 24/7 NFL Network. But he was appalled by the call, writing on X/Twitter that officials “just can’t make those calls in deciding moments.” 

The strongest comment came from Albert Breer, senior NFL reporter for Sports Illustrated. 

“I’ll reiterate my stance: Officiating needs to be torn down to the studs,” he tweeted. “They need to rebuild it with the technology that’s now available. What they’ve done instead—which is to continually add on to what they already have, and overcomplicate everything—clearly isn’t working.”

Then there’s the abomination known as the Tush Push. Even if the refs can’t see the Eagles frequently moving offside on their patented short-yardage play, viewers can. It’s frustrating that refs can’t or won’t make obvious calls while inventing others seemingly out of thin air. 

Consider the ref’s controversial call during the Eagles’ 38–20 win over the Giants on Oct. 26. On a fourth-and-1, Kayvon Thibodeaux of the Giants appeared to strip the football from Jalen Hurts as the Eagles QB reached for the first down. But the refs swooped in with one of the most atrocious calls of the season, ruling that Hurts’s forward progress had been stopped—and the play couldn’t be reviewed. Social media exploded.

As frustrated NFL analyst Jordan Schultz tweeted: “You can’t possibly call this forward progress and call the play dead. You just can’t. He’s literally getting pushed. The point of the TUSH PUSH.”

The NFL’s in great shape. Through Week 10, game telecasts were averaging 17.6 million viewers, up 7% from last season, and the best mark since the 2015 season. But maybe the league should be concerned.

NBC’s Sunday Night Football is the league’s marquee package, ranking No. 1 in prime time for an unprecedented 14 years. Does the league really want tens of millions of viewers to avidly watch a game for three and a half hours—only to throw up their hands over a bad call that decides the game? 

When the NFL locked out its regular referees in 2012, the replacement refs embarrassed the league. The infamous “Fail Mary” call during Packers-Seahawks on ESPN’s Monday Night Football was so awful the league hustled to sign a deal with the refs’ union.

More than a decade later, the refs again seem overmatched. Maybe the NFL has made the rules—particularly on pass interference—so confusing that even the zebras don’t know what’s what anymore. 

Across the board in sports, modern-day technology is playing a much more vital role in officiating. During an interview with FOS, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian said he expects tech, robots, and AI to replace human refs. Yes, it will cost people jobs. But technology ultimately makes sporting contests fairer and better, he said. “It never made sense to me why those balls and strikes are called by anything other than a robot,” noted Ohanian.

Whatever the reason, the NFL needs to figure this out. They can start by remembering the old adage: Let the players play.

When ESPN Radio boss Justin Craig offered Michelle Smallmon a role in morning drive on the show that became UnSportsmanLike, she thought he meant she was getting the overnight shift.

“It was something that, in my wildest dreams, I would have never even fathomed,” Smallmon told Front Office Sports. 

When she started cohosting UnSportsmanLike alongside Evan Cohen and Chris Canty last September, it had been a year, almost to the day, since Smallmon had moved from St. Louis to New York City without any job in hand or even a plan for where she was going to live. 

For the last decade, Smallmon has alternated between 101 ESPN in St. Louis and the national ESPN Radio network. She left a hybrid role as a producer/host at the former for a producer role at the latter in 2015, working with talents such as Jorge Sedano, Jen Lada, Danny Kanell, Ryen Russillo, and Will Cain for the next several years. In 2018, she returned to St. Louis as a host in morning drive to work with Bernie Miklasz, who has been covering sports in the area since 1985. She was later paired with Randy Karraker. 

“The ratings were great. The revenue was great. I’m in my home market. I’m with my family and my friends. And I was in the best place I’ve ever been professionally,” Smallmon said.

Nevertheless, after the COVID-19 pandemic, Smallmon was struck by wanderlust.

“Something was missing,” Smallmon said. “The pandemic just kind of woke us all up in a different way. It reminded us that life is short and that you never know what’s coming around the corner—that life could change pretty drastically at any moment—and so you don’t really have time to wait, and if you want to go for something do it.” 

The Big Apple beckoned.

“I’d always wanted to live in New York City. I’d always want to live in a big city. And I just thought, If I don’t do this now, I’m never going to do it,” Smallmon recalled.

She told the station’s program director, Tommy Mattern, about her thoughts and he encouraged her to take the leap. 

“He was like, ‘Listen, if this is something you need to do, do it. We will still use you in a fill-in capacity here and there. And if you want to come home, we’ll figure something out. But if you want to do it, I care about you more as a person than an employee, so go for it,’” Smallmon said.

Thus, Smallmon began a voyage in which she gave herself a year to figure it out. She got a 30-show “usage” deal with ESPN Radio, meaning dates she would fill in, and also filled in on occasion at 101 ESPN and on SiriusXM. 

“I was working at a jewelry store. I was packing meals on the side. I was doing all these little odds-and-ends jobs just to make enough money to stay in New York,” Smallmon said. 

As her ESPN Radio usage deal was expiring, she got offered the job on UnSportsmanLike. Dating back to the days of Mike & Mike, morning drive has been the cornerstone of the network. During the aforementioned conversation with Craig, the ESPN Radio boss, Smallmon was stunned.

“I thought he meant, like, the overnight SportsCenter All Night, the lead-in to the morning show, because it was such an incredible jump,” Smallmon said. 

As with announcing booths, a three-person radio show can be tricky because the finite amount of airtime requires the hosts to proverbially share the ball. Traditional radio hosts can, in many cases, be boisterous or overtly attention-seeking. So it’s noteworthy that Smallmon is more reserved.

“I don’t need the spotlight. That’s never been who I am, which is probably why I was reticent to be the host in the first place, to get on the other side of the glass, because I didn’t know if I would like the attention that comes along with it,” she said. 

“And it’s still something that I struggle with, candidly, from time to time. If people recognize us out in the street, I’m always like, ‘Oh, have I met you before?’ I forget that we have millions of listeners. When you’re a producer, you’re thinking about, How do we build the show effectively? How do we get people to think? How do we entertain? How do we inform? And I guess when I sit down every day, I first and foremost want to be true to myself. And I’m not sitting in this chair to try to get attention because that’s not who I am inherently.” 

YouTube TV’s multiyear carriage agreement with ESPN parent company Disney, reached after 15 difficult days of a channel blackout, is aimed in part at pushing boundaries in traditional television distribution.

The pact marked a significant reversal after Disney had appeared dug in for a potentially protracted outage on the No. 4 U.S. pay-TV distributor. As the dust settles, though, the parties have a goal of helping forge a new model for how TV distribution works. 

“Over the past few years, we’ve led the way in creating innovative deals with key partners—each one unique, and each designed to recognize the full value of our programming,” ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Disney Entertainment co-chairs Dana Walden and Alan Bergman wrote in a joint company memo. “This new agreement reflects the same creativity and commitment to doing what’s best for both our audiences and our business.”

While specific contract details were not disclosed, the deal contains one particularly notable component: the full features of ESPN Unlimited, the highest level of ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer offering, will be integrated into YouTube TV. 

That element—known within the television business as ingestion—bears some similarity to deals Disney has with other major distributors such as Spectrum. The YouTube TV–ESPN DTC integration, however, will be entirely a streaming-based one, involving the largest virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD). 

Additionally, YouTube TV has a clear aim of building beyond its current base of about 10 million subscribers and ultimately passing Spectrum, Comcast, and DirecTV to become the nation’s top distributor.

Ingestion has quickly become a critical part of many other carriage deals between distributors and programmers as the lines blur further between linear programming and streaming. NBCUniversal recently addressed this by resurrecting the former NBC Sports Network, which mirrors much of the sports content on Peacock and will be carried on YouTube TV.

“Amazing win for YouTube TV subscribers as they will ingest ESPN+ and ESPN Unlimited content into YouTube TV,” tweeted LightShed Partners analyst Rich Greenfield. “No need to use the ESPN app to watch content. This is the biggest issue in [the] streaming wars that isn’t getting enough attention.”

Core Approach

Disney has a critical precedent of turning a former contract combatant into an important ally in a fast-changing television business. Two years ago, the company was locked in a similarly bitter carriage fight with Spectrum, the top distributor in the country. After 11 days of a blackout, the parties reached a broad-based deal that included Charter gaining the ability to include the ESPN DTC service in its bundles.

Now, the relationship has taken another big step as ESPN DTC is also part of a larger suite of streaming apps from multiple programmers that can be acquired and managed through a single, Spectrum-controlled platform.

“It’s about taking friction out of the whole process for the consumer, and that’s nothing but goodness for Disney and for ESPN,” Pitaro said last month. 

Meanwhile, it will bear close watching what happens to YouTube TV’s base price—$82.99—in the wake of a sweep of carriage deals this year that includes all four major U.S. broadcast networks and their parent companies. Within the last nine months, YouTube TV reached pacts with CBS parent Paramount, NBC parent NBCUniversal, and Fox, in addition to the deal with Disney, which owns ABC.