Officiating an NFL game is hard. The people who do it don’t even get to focus on it as a full-time profession. If there’s a good reason for that I’ve yet to hear it. /rant
The rule-book is insane. You can’t even define a ‘catch’ adequately, a fairly fundamental function of an NFL game one might think. The tuck rule. Points of emphasis. Forward progress. A lot of it is not intuitive, complex, and has to be decided upon in less than a split second. Not to mention taking into consideration changes that happen to the book every. signle. offseason.
Refs are human, that is to say, fallible. Yep, dude blew the Jimmy Graham PI call. It was clear as day and he missed it. It’s not because his aunt grew up as a cheese-maker on the plains of Wisconsin, it’s because the guy is a *guy* and he got it wrong. Stones and glass and all that. Obvious calls go against a team all the time. While it seems like it happens to the Seahawks more often than other teams, it probably doesn’t.
Is it unjust? Yes.
Is it deliberate? You’d have to make a pretty darn strong case to get me to agree to that and I haven’t seen a strong enough case yet.
That being said, we *know* that biased officiating exists in the NFL. It comes in the form of “make-up calls.” When a team of refs know they’ve messed up, they’ll call a ticky-tack or non-existent foul on the other team to make up for it. This is a known, well-documented phenomenon. This is a limited attempt at justice and lets us know that refs are acutely aware of the issue and take active steps to attempt to balance the cosmic scales *toward* justice, not away from it.
An NFL game is a bunch of manly men doing manly things. Stoicism, sacrifice, and effort in the face of incredible odds are celebrated. Whining about a level playing field doesn’t fit in the mindset. The mindset is, “Overcome, even if the odds are against you. ESPECIALLY when the odds are against you.” You’re unlikely to find football people who empathize with the line of thinking that football is broken because of the refs. Because of the *rules*, yes, but only because those get in the way of people doing things. The only purchase you’ll likely find is, “The whole world is against you. Strive to show them you will beat them despite it.”
Until egregious examples of bias or rigging appear, this is not an issue that will break the game the way that boxing was broken. A block in the back on a precious, top-tier QB and a non-call on a PI is not such an example.