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 the 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. Philadelphia iced the game after the refs made a “terrible” pass interference call, in the eyes of 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 a recent interview with Front Office Sports, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian said he wants to see tech, robots, and AI fully replace human refs. Yes, it will cost human 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.
