It’s All Over

No, it’s not the season that is all over.  Far from it.  As I began to indicate in my previous post, I continue to be rather optimistic about the Packers’ 2012 season.  Ah, but the controversial end to the Monday Night Football game is all over.  Everywhere you look, people are writing about it and talking about it.  While the replacement refs were already a hot topic in the sports world, what happened at the end of the Packers-Seahawks game raised the whole issue to a whole new level.

It was the perfect storm:  a nationally televised primetime game, a close game, a game-changing call, and a manifestly egregious error.  Remove any one of those elements, and the outcry would not be so great.

Imagine, for example, that this had happened during one of the early games on a Sunday afternoon.  Only a fraction of America’s football fans would have been watching.  And while it would have been widely reported, the level of “you’ve got to be kidding” outrage would not be the same.

Or imagine that it had been a blown call during the midst of the game.  (Wait, there were a few of those, too.)  It would be exasperating, but still the matter-of-fact nature of sports would conclude, “Well, the Packers still had 20 minutes (or whatever) of game left to make up for it and win.”

Or imagine that it had been a close call – like the famed “was Majkowski over the line when he threw the ball” question and the “immaculate reception,” which have been debated back and forth for years.  It would make for a fun water cooler conversation, but it wouldn’t prompt the visceral reaction (except among the offended fan base, of course). 

But this was so viewed, so pivotal, and so obvious.  It’s all over.  Sports Illustrated’s web site’s primary headline on Tuesday morning called it “Nightmare Scenario.”

ESPN.com also lead with the same story – indeed, the same photo.  Playing on the Tom Hanks movie title, they called the refs “Clueless in Seattle.”

Yahoo Sports was openly calling upon the commissioner to make things right. 

Fox Sports captured the same embarrassing moment and called it “Gross National Product.”

CBS Sports cleverly dubbed it “Officially a Mess.”

Even NFL.com, which tends to underplay league controversies, recognized the debatable nature of Monday Night’s ending.

And the headlines went beyond just the sports world.  More traditional news shows and outlets were also talking about it on Tuesday.  And Tuesday morning’s Drudge Report led with the mess.

As the day after unfolded, the furor did not die down.  See the variety of headlines that Drudge had culled concerning this debacle by Tuesday afternoon:

So what will become of all this? 

Well, evidently not an overruled result.  We’ll contemplate that failure of the commissioner’s office more later.  But it does seem clear that public pressure on the league has been pretty intense, and the locked out refs suddenly had a much stronger hand than they prior to this last weekend.  The deal will finally get done, and in the end it will have been the Green Bay Packers who were the heroes:  suffering personal loss for the greater good and the benefit of the whole. 

And whenever the real refs are introduced before the games – perhaps as early as this Sunday – I expect that they will enjoy an unprecedented standing ovation in stadiums all around the country.

Now if only they had some way to show their gratitude to the Packers who made it all possible…