MtnExile

Halo is right, but there's another dimension to the anti-ref talk, and it's this: officiating in the NFL is at an abysmally low level. It has reached the point where people expect every game to have lousy officiating...and they're usually right. It's true that both sides have to play through bad officiating, just as they do the weather, and in theory it evens out; but accepting that as simply an unchangeable fact only helps to perpetuate the problem. Unfortunately, the only way to force the NFL to clean up its act is to challenge the legitimacy of the outcome...and when you do that, you inevitably come off as whiny.

Maybe the solution would be for the punditry to take up a real controversy, and an important one, with the same fervor they display for a phony one like the Redskins' name.