Talks about the NFL rigging games for favorable outcomes are at an all-time high. The NFL community is rife with conspiracy theories making the rounds. Although, the majority of people believing in these theories seem to be in the fanbase. Commentators and analysts, such as ESPN’s Mike Greenberg, still believe the NFL isn’t rigged. They just have terrible officials.
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Speaking on his show ‘Greeny’, Greenberg shares his thoughts on the entire situation. He says, “These games were definitely not rigged… They were badly officiated, that is 100% true. And particularly the AFC game. Actually, I thought the officiating in the first game was almost equally bad.”
“But it didn’t matter, because it was a blowout, and nothing the officials were gonna do in that game was gonna have any impact in the outcome. So you stopped paying attention. The second game was horribly officiated, and it felt like that because it was incredibly one-sided. that is 100% because of a bad job done by the officials, and 1000% not because of bias,” he adds.
“They are human beings, who did not have a good day at the office. But I will say, that the fact that so many people.. that is how people are reacting is a problem. If this doesn’t make them [NFL] address it [bad officiating], I don’t know what will. Everything in sports has gotten better…and the officiating has gotten worse,” he concludes.
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Fans raise concerns of NFL rigging games after bad calls plague AFC game
In all fairness, the conspiracy theories that fans are bringing up are not totally unfounded. The fact that officials are making so many bad calls, and that a lot of them are directly impacting the game’s outcome, is definitely suspicious. The only way the NFL can get rid of these rumors is if they actively start looking into the officiating policy they have.
However, one cannot simply place the blame on the referees either. As Yahoo’s Jay Hart writes, what fans and analysts crave is perfection from referees. This is impossible, given that there are only a few referees on the field trying to keep an eye on a hundred possible things. Calls will be missed, and mistakes made. Sure, some of those mistakes can be fixed if the NFL releases guidelines for certain calls.
There are some who believe making officials full-time employees of the NFL will fix the issue. Although, they fail to detail how this might even come about, as the referees coming to officiate are going to be the same. The ground reality is, we cannot expect referees to see things that we see. Because they don’t watch games from a tv that can show replays from 20 different cameras. A luxury they don’t have.
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