PITTSBURGH — Football people have mostly defended the ridiculous holding call that ruined the Super Bowl. So thank goodness for Ben Roethlisberger, who spoke for millions with his take on the play.
“I hate that that great game ended that way,” Roethlisberger said on his “Footbahlin” podcast. “I hate that.”
I can’t tell you how many people — most of them casual football fans — have told me over the past few days how the puny little B.S. call on Philadelphia Eagles cornerback James Bradberry literally ruined the game for them. One compared it to a riveting movie wrecked by a stupid, anticlimactic ending.
You don’t leave that experience saying, “Wow, what a great movie; too bad about the ending.”
You leave saying, “That movie stunk.”
You leave feeling robbed.
Of course, the fact that we were possibly deprived of a historically dramatic ending doesn’t mean the call was wrong. The call was wrong for multiple other reasons.
Roethlisberger listed the main one: “I’m really mad at that call because I think things like that happen every play.”
Bingo. Things like that happen every play. I’ll bet Roethlisberger could cut up video of literally 200 Steelers passes this season that featured the kind of in-fighting that occurred on that play — a tug here, a hold there, a push-off here (and it looked to me like JuJu pushed off late, if we’re going letter of the law) — and went uncalled.
To choose that moment, in that game, to make such a ticky-tack call, well, I’m with Ben. And hate is too light a word.
I might feel differently if it had been a tightly called game. It was the polar opposite of that. Clearly, the officials wanted to give the players plenty of leeway. They wanted to “let them play,” as the saying goes. Barely anything beyond line infractions were flagged.
Bradberry took the high road, admitting he grabbed JuJu Smith-Schuster’s jersey. People have used his statement as ultimate proof of a legit call. It’s not. Everybody could see he briefly tugged JuJu’s jersey. There’s way more to the story, and nobody seems to add that Bradberry also said, “I was hoping they would let it slide.” He was thinking that way, I would imagine, because they let virtually everything else slide.
How many football games have you watched, in your entire lifetime, that featured exactly zero holding calls for the first 58 1/2 minutes? Not a single offensive lineman, not a single player defending a pass, not a single special teams player, was flagged for holding. Not until the end, anyway, with 130 million people on the edges of their seats and legacies on the line. Jalen Hurts deserved one more possession.
Having covered sports for 30 some years, I can tell you that above all else, players and coaches want consistency when it comes to officiating. They want officials, by their actions early in the game, to let everybody know how this one will be called: loose or tight?
Again, this game featured zero holding calls for 58 1/2 minutes. Not one. What happened at the end was the equivalent of an umpire calling pitches on the low outside corner balls for 8 2/3 innings, then suddenly calling it a strike to end Game 7 of the World Series.
There are always gray areas in officiating. Yet I keep hearing, “A foul is a foul.”
OK, then I have a question: Is it a foul that offensive tackles routinely move before the snap these days, including several times in the Super Bowl? Or are we just letting that go?
And why is offensive holding so casually disregarded as compared to defensive holding?
I suppose on the latter question it’s because there are 10 or 12 players battling in a scrum when offensive holding happens, whereas the in-fighting in the secondary is generally a one-on-one situation, there for all the world to see. We’re fooled into believing a defensive hold is more pertinent to a game’s outcome more than an offensive hold.
Speaking of which, one could argue (and this one would) that the Cincinnati Bengals were robbed in the AFC championship game every bit as egregiously as the New Orleans Saints in the NFC Championship a few years back on that missed interference call.
In this case, it was Bengals defensive end Trey Hendrickson basically being tackled on a pass rush on the play where Patrick Mahomes scrambled and was hit out of bounds to set up the game-winning field goal.
But back to “a foul is a foul” and “letter of law.” Is that really how you want the biggest games to be officiated? Did you want “foul is a foul” implemented in the old Big East basketball battles? Did you want a situation where officials let the players bash each other silly for 39 minutes, then called a touch foul to decide a game?
Of course not.
Because they let that stuff go FOR THE ENTIRE GAME!
If I’m an official, I’m not thinking “a foul is foul” with the Super Bowl on the line, unless we’ve called it that way the whole night. They didn’t in this case. So if I’m that guy, I am very literally calling it in the fourth quarter the way it was called in the first quarter — very lightly. I need to see something borderline scandalous to throw that flag.
This did not rise to that. It didn’t come close, actually.
Things like that happen every play.
