YESTERDAY the NFL took a serious hit to its credibility when hours before the Lions/Cowboys kicked off, it was reported that the Head of NFL Officiating, Dean Blandino, was seen partying on the Dallas Cowboys bus. This is an old report, but still. There was no doubt going to be an inquiry into what he was doing there. It all could have very well turned out to be harmless.
But then there was that play.
Full disclosure: I did not watch the game. I was avoiding sports after learning of Stuart Scott’s passing, and instead decided to continue my personal ‘Breaking Bad’ marathon on Netflix. (And YES, I’m aware of the irony there.)
However, once I came out of my cocoon, it was impossible to escape the replay. If you were sitting anywhere near a screen, you couldn’t avoid it. At such a critical point in the game, to get a call wrong is bad enough. But picking up that flag was more than just wrong. It was a deliberate and blatant an act of sabotage.
To call that anything less than tampering is to deny what the entire world saw. Former-referee-turned-FOX-rules-expert Mike Pereira, has said that flag should not have been picked up. HOFer Warren Sapp (a proud Cowboys fan) described it on Twitter as “Home Cookin”. As you saw (if you clicked the link), Sapp wasn’t the only former player to make it known that he thought tampering had taken place.
The real issue here is the appearance of allowed impropriety by the NFL. Overwhelming public sentiment is that something shady happened, and that we all (figuratively speaking) saw it go down. Overwhelming public sentiment is that we all know who the culprits are, because we saw them commit the act. Who won or lost this single game, is immaterial. The public sentiment and trust in the NFL as an institution, is what is at stake here, and is what must be addressed.
If this was just one bad call, it would simply be a blown call; but the sheer blatant nature of the act, set against the backdrop of Blandino getting all cozy-cozy, nice-nice with the Cowboys…It looks bad. There’s prima facie here people. LOADS of it. On record and broadcasted nationally.
Sweeping this under the rug, won’t do. Waiting for it to blow over, won’t do. This one (like the blown Fail Mary call by replacement refs a couple years ago), is burned into our collective, public memory. And just like we’ll remember this for years to come, we’ll also remember if the NFL acts like nothing, specifically nothing wrong, happened.
EAGLEMANIACAL.com 
The pass was short but it was interference and called it on the field. Jerry overturned it. And the Eagles are grabbing headlines shuffling a bunch of mid range salaried employees around in the front office. The restructure of the Eagles amounts to a lot of nothing.
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Not if you’re a fan.
Functionally it does little, but as a P.R. move it’s almost seismic in nature. Keep in mind that most earthquakes go completely unfelt. Then one day there’s a hiccup and enough energy is released to change the landscape forever.
There’s a hiccup coming.
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I saw a comment by a self proclaimed “I’ve seen enough football to know” in that he said this means that next week, GB will be getting most of the calls going their way. I’ve never paid attention to bad calls and their aftermath before….do this have any credence to you Eagle?
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More or less, yeah. There is so much public backlash over this. The NFL and refs will be eager to show there is no favoritism towards the Cowboys/Jerry Jones.
What has me sort of chuckling over this is that you had to see it coming. 1) BEFORE kick-off yesterday I’d shared that story from August where Dean Blandino was partying with the Cowboys, and 2) With Suh on the team, you have to know that your team won’t get the benefit of any doubt. It was the same with Warren Sapp after the incident in GB over a decade ago. Questionable calls plagued anywhere he went after that. It’s the price you pay for having a guy who people hate personally. Refs are people too.
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