The Green Bay Packers beat the Seattle Seahawks on Monday night by a score of 12-7. They are 2-1, tied with the Chicago Bears and the Minnesota Vikings atop the N.F.C. North. There can be no disputing that—not in a just world.
But this is not a just world. This is the N.F.L.’s domain, and in it, the call made by their replacement refs that decided the Packers-Seahawks game, wrongly, for the Seahawks, was correct. Tuesday, under siege from fans and commentators, the league put out a statement about the disputed final play of the game, in which a Packer defender had clearly intercepted the ball in the end zone, but the Seahawks were awarded the game-winning touchdown anyway:
This was, very clearly, not the right thing to do. The right thing to do would have been to overturn the Seahawks’ victory and award the game to the Packers—an act that would have been within Roger Goodell’s powers as commissioner of the N.F.L. To people who don’t follow pro football, it may be surprising that the league wouldn’t want to see justice done, that it would decide to stand by a call that everyone but the replacement referees could see was an egregious error—a call that, come playoff time, may determine the fate of not just the two teams that played last night, but any number of others; a call on which hundreds of millions of dollars (and not just wagers, but performance bonuses, ticket sales, merchandising and more) were riding.
But those familiar with the N.F.L. and its standard operating procedure can’t be shocked. This is how the league works: because of its popularity and because of the huge revenue streams it provides for all sorts of people, it has an outsized amount of power. And it chooses to use that power to function, in many ways, as if it were a dictatorship.
Yes, this comparison is overblown: the N.F.L. is not oppressing people, nor killing them, much less committing war crimes or any other atrocities. But in a few key ways, it holds surprisingly well:
Faced with a major problem, its solution is not to address the issue, but to punish those who point it out. When the league decided to lock out its regular referees, it knew that something like what happened on Monday night was possible. That’s apparently a risk it’s been happy to take, despite a number of other games over the past few weeks in which bad calls by replacement officials may very well have determined the outcome, if not quite so obviously.
The N.F.L.’s response to those blown calls wasn’t to rush back to the negotiating table, or to discipline the scabs it hired. It was to fine the coaches who complained.
Granted, the N.F.L. has always given itself the power to punish coaches and players who complain about or intimidate the officials, and it exercises that power regularly. But that’s different. The referees have to be able to stand up to the people whose conduct they’re judging, and in this case those people quite often stand 6’5” or so, weigh three hundred pounds or more, and are freakishly strong and trained in violence. The league has to make sure the refs are respected.
This year, though, these penalties have seemingly been employed as a way to silence dissent. And the league has gone beyond mere fines: when Denver Broncos coach John Fox and defensive coördinator Jack Del Rio were vocal about their displeasure over inept officiating during a game, they reportedly got a call from the league at halftime warning them to tone it down. It hardly seems like a coincidence that the game in question was being nationally televised. (Fox and Del Rio were both eventually fined, as well.)
There is no rule of law. Due to the N.F.L. owners’ decision to opt out of their collective-bargaining agreement with the players two years early, the league did not have a salary cap in 2010, and teams were free to spend whatever they wanted on players. This was part of the contract. (The idea was that if you make the last year of each C.B.A. uncapped, the two sides would agree to a new deal before the old one expired.)
But the N.F.L. doesn’t much like the idea of going back to the days before the cap. So, as far as we know, it simply instructed teams to ignore the fact that there was no salary cap—again, a fact determined by contract. Then, after a new C.B.A. was in place, teams that had ignored the unwritten rules in favor of the written ones were hit with serious penalties. As ESPN.com’s Dan Graziano put it, “In the NFL’s world, you pretty much have to do what the NFL tells you to do.”
It controls the media. To the networks that air it, football is more than just a sport—it’s billions of dollars, in both costs and revenue, and it’s a priceless opportunity to promote its other programming. As a result, the networks are usually loath to cross the N.F.L., lest they risk losing out on its content the next time rights negotiations roll around. In 2004, for instance, ESPN cancelled its series “Playmakers,” a fictionalized drama about life in professional football, after a series of complaints from the league. Commenting on the decision at the time, ESPN’s executive vice president said, “It’s our opinion that we’re not in the business of antagonizing our partner, even though we’ve done it, and continued to carry it over the N.F.L.’s objections. To bring it back would be rubbing it in our partner’s face.”
To their credit, the networks—including ESPN—have largely provided excellent coverage of the replacement refs’ woes. But the longer the lockout drags on, the more the possibility that the networks will muzzle their on-air talent grows. During ESPN’s pregame show last night—before the disaster that was the officiating during the game itself—its panelists sharply criticized the replacement refs’ performance, and chided the N.F.L. for allowing them on the field. And then they speculated about the possibility that their boss would call them and tell them to shut up. (After the game, as Amy Davidson notes, their commentary turned even sharper.)
The networks do have an incentive to try and force the league to cut a deal with the refs—the scabs’ work has been so incompetent at times that some games have gone on for much longer than they normally would have. That extra time means bored viewers during the games. If they turn the channel, those new shows don’t get the kind of eyeballs the networks want, and neither do other shows, like local news, that keep the affiliates running. That said, though, if the replacements can at least get their act together enough to bring the length of the games back down, then the networks would be best served by trying to pretend that everything is back to normal, and that the games are as legitimate as ever. And the way to do that, of course, is to shut down criticism of the replacements.
There is no escape. The N.F.L.’s attitude right now might be best described as: What are you going to do, watch the Canadian Football League?
And that’s not a terrible point. No other professional sport in the U.S. is a credible challenger to football’s dominance, and so far fans haven’t shown any sign that they’ll abandon the N.F.L. if the real refs don’t come back soon. But there is college football, and there are other sports—and there’s no predicting the future. If the Berlin Wall could fall, so can the N.F.L.
Photograph by Jamie Squire/Getty.