[OverAndBack]

Originally posted by carolinaRRREF
you have numbers, but calling something a "good call" is not a fact. It's an opinion -- one shared by the vast minority of America.

I suppose you have the numbers from that survey? I hear a very vocal minority of people who aren't educated as to the rules, who can't handle the fact their team lost and look for a scapegoat (and officials are the easiest scapegoats there are), who are sports talk show hosts and internet morons. I have a very, very hard time believing that those who feel this is much ado about nothing are in the minority.

But, hell, you probably know, since you were so close on how many OPI calls there were last year and how many of them were blatant and how many were ticky-tack hand-checks.

I just believe the game was officiated poorly, and the people here are defending the refs because they're defensive about everybody saying how bad they were, instead of considering the possibility that their heros in the NFL had a bad game.

Again - have you ever considered that it's just because we don't share your opinion? I'm not defensive - I know Jeff's not defensive. We (and others) happen to think the calls were correct. We're also not averse at all (if you've been around here long enough) to saying "Now THAT was a bad call." NFL refs aren't my heroes - I respect the hell out of them, but if the caterwauling is misplaced (as I believe this is), I'm going to share my opinion: which is that most of the arguments seem to boil down to this:

(a) "Well, yeah, but that's just the way the rule reads, I wouldn't want you to actually call it in a scoreless game;"
(b ) "That's never called, so it shouldn't be called;" or
(c) "The Seahawks were penalized more often and at crucial times than the Steelers were, therefore it's not that the Steelers made fewer mistakes, it's that the refs were picking on Seattle."

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty ridiculous to me.

And that shallow-mindedness, I believe, is a very bad trait for somebody calling a game to have.

But making stuff up and being hysterical and refusing to admit that maybe a reasonable person would disagree with you - those are great traits for somebody calling a game to have.

You don't know the people here. You don't know how they officiate. You don't know their preparedness or their commitment to officiating. You don't know how much they study or how much they care, yet you have no problem presuming that because they don't agree with your opinion (like you said, opinion, not fact), they're a "poor excuse for an official" and "shallow-minded, which is a bad trait for somebody calling a game to have."

I don't know anything about you as an official. But from what you've written and how you've presented your arguments, I figure you're not open to having your beliefs challenged at all by visual evidence or the experience of your colleagues in the profession. And that, I can tell you without a doubt, is not a trait you want an official to have.