Chansky’s Notebook: Stop The Freaking Game!

It is ludicrous the NFL can’t prevent what happened to the Saints.

The National Football League is the richest professional sports enterprise in the U.S. if not the world. Millions upon millions are spent watching, attending, advertising and betting on games every season. But this billion-dollar business is still bush league.

It is controlled by greedy owners and a 40-million-a-year commissioner who say they do what is for the good of the game, but they fall short of that almost every year for one petty or jealous reason or another. And the various committees made up of owners, coaches and players never seem to get it right – from missing sexual assault cases for months to spending millions to investigate something stupid like Deflategate.

With seven officials on the field and a dozen or so more watching from every angle on TV replays in New York, you would think the NFL had some kind of fail-safe system that would prevent deciding which team goes to the Super Bowl on a criminal no-call like allowing that blatant pass interference and/or helmet-to-helmet hit made by the LA Rams against New Orleans inside the 10-yard line in the closing minutes of the NFC championship game.

Any NBA game can get buzzed from New York when something looks suspicious on the court. How many times have we seen Major League Baseball umpires huddle up over what they’re not sure about and then ask for a review from their office in New York? The NFL says judgment calls are not reviewable, but someone on the field or in the replay office had to take another look at that play that pretty much decided the NFC’s Super Bowl participant.

Sure, it was a judgment call on which no official threw a flag while Saints coach Sean Payton and their fans went berserko over the high-speed collision that even the defensive back later admitted was a penalty. If in doubt, stop the freaking game to review it.  They stop it for interminable commercials anyway.

Coaches can’t throw the red challenge flag on any judgment call. They can if they think a player stepped out of bounds or actually dropped a pass when ruled complete or anything else finite. It is so simple. Anything that LOOKS wrong has to be looked at again. The rule will be changed this off-season, but the Saints still have to suffer the inertia of the NFL.

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