The Fix Was In

Man it is good seeing the Chiefs find a way to pull that game out of their asses on Monday night against the Chargers. I mean, I'm no kind of Chiefs fan, although I'll freely admit that I have no clue why there is so much animosity and lack of faith in relatively new head coach Todd Haley there, with whom I think the inescapable conclusion is that he has done a pretty damn good job with what I would not consider to be a plethora of talent or anything. But the reason I was so happy to see the Chiefs take that game down was not at all because I like the Chiefs.

It's because I like fucking fairness.

Did you watch that game? Let's see. First, the Chiefs guy intercepts Philip Rivers for the first of what, 15 times on the night, there in the first quarter? He makes a small return, gets tackled from behind, and after sitting squarely on the ground for a few seconds, taking some time to shave, say his daily prayers, and have a convo or two on his cell phone, the ball finally gets stripped out of his hands. Of course the refs ruled him down by contact on the field -- because it wasn't even close -- but then Norv Turner, raging idiot that he is, decides to challenge the ruling on the field even though there isn't any possible way in shit that any single human being could ever rule that a fumble. I mean, don't assholes like Norv have a guy sitting up in the booth somewhere, with access to the replay, a DVR, something? Just somebody who can tell him, "Don't waste your time, you boob, that play wasn't even fucking close to a fumble, you'll just look like a horse's ass if you waste a timeout challenging that very clear tackle." Is it possible that they don't?

So while the network takes a commercial break, both before and after the break they're showing the replay, and even the dickhead announcers -- who generally speaking interpret what they see incorrectly in terms of missed calls at least 66% of the time, much to the fans' enragement -- had already dismissed this as the worst challenge ever, that even if the call on the field had been a fumble, you would have to reverse it based on this very, very, plainly obvious replay. And then of course what happens, since this is the NFL, Roger Goodell's minions the refs walk out from under "the box" and announce that the call on the field is being reversed, it's a fumble and the ball goes back to the Chargers, instead of to the Chiefs who already had a 7-0 lead and would have been very close to making it 14-0 in gaining possession there deep in Chargers territory. It was without a doubt the single worst blown replay call I can ever recall -- and this is the NFL, where there are inexplicably obvious missed calls with a regularity greater than my daily bowel movements, and to think that anybody on the fucking earth had seen the clear and convincing evidence needed to overturn the call on the field, there are just no words, and just like that, boom the NFL darling Chargers were gifted pretty much a 10-point swing in the score early on.

But it didn't stop there. Later in the second quarter, Chief's quarterback Matt Cassel is hit as he goes to throw the ball, and this time the call on the field is that he threw an incomplete pass, that his arm was just starting to move forward when he got hit and lost the ball, so thus not a fumble and thus it is still Chiefs ball (the Chargers had picked up the incompletion on the field). The Chargers challenge again -- they shouldn't even have had another challenge to call there, but thanks to the early blowjob for the Chargers, they still had that challenge left in the first half -- and this time, lo and behold, this time the moron refs saw clear and convincing evidence needed to overturn and -- shocker of shockers -- give the ball back to the Chargers. Again. Personally, unlike the first fumble play which was the worst call I've ever seen in any professional sport in the history of mankind, this one was very close, and I could have seen it going either way. Give me an unbiased, even choice and I would probably have called it in an incompletion, but his arm was very close to either about to start moving forward or just started moving forward, and I can handle that call going either way. But what there clear evidence to overturn there? Not on your shitkicking life there was not. But hey, the decision got the easily-sellable Chargers offense the ball again, so Roger Goodell got to keep his boner for another few minutes there and that's all that matters.

Fast forward to the second half, as the game is really coming down to the wire, and the Chargers have to score two late touchdowns, including a 2-point conversion on one of them, just to tie the game up at the end, and first the refs award a touchdown to the Chargers after reviewing a play where the Charger player basically got the ball just barely over the end line before having it stripped out of his hands for a fumble that would have -- for the third or fourth time on the night now -- all but won the game for the Chiefs. On that one I tend to agree with the call that it was a Chargers touchdown, but lord knows I've seen that call go the opposite way at least 5000 times over the past five years in the NFL. And then came yet another stunning F-off to the Chiefs, when the Chargers player attempts to run in the 2-point conversion after catching a pass around the 2 yard line, where he was nailed by a fabulous defensive play by the Chiefs' gritty defense, and the fucking refs motherfucking again awarded the Chargers the score -- a crucial score to tie up the game with just a few minutes left to play -- based on a replay that maybe, possibly just showed the nose of the ball accidentally graze the plane of the end line as the receiver was unthinkably running sideways instead of just trying to punch it in there. I mean, this Chargers guy did everything in his power to give the refs a reason not to award him a touchdown, and I still cannot believe as I look at the replay that the Chargers got that call in their favor as well, but they did.

Suddenly it is 20-20, and after a short possession by the Chiefs, the Chargers march down the field, and they're just lining up on the Chiefs' 16-yard line when Rivers unimaginably muffs the snap, and the Chiefs clearly recover the fumble. I could just picture Goodell's tiny little limpy dick shriveling up like a prune when it happened too, because there was simply no fucking way they could find to award that ball back to the Chargers. And I'm sure they tried to, too, don't get me wrong. I bet you Goodell had every guy he knows rifling through the rulebook to try to find some reason why a fumbled snap by the road team in a tie game does not lead to a change in possession if in the final minute of a regular season game, you name it, the stupider and less substantiable the better. But they couldn't, and we went to overtime, where the Chiefs won it in "amazing comeback" fashion.

The only thing amazing about the Chiefs win last night is how badly they outplayed the Chargers from the first whistle to the last, and yet how close the game was because, if the referees are willing to be big enough assholes, it can be almost impossible to overcome a fix like the one that was clearly in last night.

Go ahead, I dare anyone reading this to tell me in the comments that I am mischaracterizing what happened with the calls last night. The first person to comment that I am mischaracterizing what happened has no penis. Sure I've included some factual inaccuracies in this post to give the tinydicks something to complain about in the comments, but I triple dog dare anyone out there to tell me the Chargers did not get the most ridiculous dicksucking treatment by the refs last night anywhere this side of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Fuck you, Roger Goodell. Karma's a bitch, ain't it, you piece of shit.

Like a Broken Record

Woe is the NFL officiating. I know this has been a repeated focus here on the blog over this past season or two in what is still (for now) the world's greatest sport, but the downslide has continued pretty much from the first game to right now this year, and the truly unbelievable problems with the refereeing in this league simply cannot go away for even one week of the entire season. In a year that began with the refs taking away a clear victory from the hapless Detroit Lions on an obvious touchdown that was wrongfully taken away in the literal final seconds, the refs have more and more exerted their influence and control over the games, including right into this week when fully two of just the three games I was able to watch were clearly straight-up decided by the referees.

First, we have the Ravens-Steelers game on Sunday night, which hopefully some of you sat and watched on national tv -- with the sound down if you're lucky, since Chris Collinsworthless was on the mike -- because then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now, kudos to Troy Polamalu -- still the best individual player on defense in the entire league -- for the incredible play he made to cause Ravens' quarterback Joe Flacco to fumble in the final two minutes of a game that was otherwise pretty much over. It was an amazing play, and frankly it's the kind of thing Mr. Hair has been doing for years, it was pure athleticism, and you can't say anything but amazing things about him or about that play that allowed his team to snatch a victory away from what was othewise a certain 4-point defeat at the hands of the Ravens. That said, the Steelers should never, ever have been in that position, and they wouldn't have been if the referees had not decided earlier in the 4th quarter to simply require that the Steelers get back into a game where they could not do shizzsquat whatsoever on offense throughout. Over two plays in the middle of the 4th quarter on a crucial drive for the Steelers that even with the refs' blatant help they could still only score a field goal on, the refs made two calls that -- although Chris Collfuckworth of course wouldn't say a word about it on the telecast -- were just plain indefensible and were quite obviously done with the intent of allowing Pittsburgh back into the game. First, on the first fourth down the Steelers' faced on the drive, when they hastily decided to go no-huddle and go for it on 4th and 2 around the 50-yard line, Ben Roethlisberger clearly started moving backward before the hike, causing the Ravens' defenders to begin their rush, and of course the call came in as an offsides penalty, which just happened to give the Steelers a much-needed first down, one that everybody in the stadium knew they would have never gotten without the refs' help. Listening to the fuckheads calling the game on NBC's "coverage" (as if they actually cover anything real on that shitshow), you wouldn't even have thought there was any possible disagreement about the call at all. But thank god I'm here to set you straight, because I have these two holes in my skull with some juicy rods and cones in there -- I call them eyes -- and I can use my objective brain to call 'em as I see 'em, and on that one, Ben Roth illegally drew the defense offsides by starting to move before hiking the ball. I guess the refs just missed it?

But that wasn't even the worst part. Later on the same drive, after the refs had already once taken the ball out of the Steelers' inept offense's hands and forced a first down on 4th and 1 once, the refs then turned around on a second 4th and 1 in the same drive -- notice that the Steelers simply could not do shit on offense, which is why they kept needing 5 downs and some help from the refs just to get themselves 10 freaking yards against the Ravens' stingy defense -- and the refs called a silly holding penalty when the Steelers once again failed to get the required yards to keep the drive (and thus the game) alive. Give the Ravens the ball like they earned on that play, and this game was over. The Ravens would only have needed 20 or 30 yards of offense to get another field goal and put the game out of reach for good with little time left. So the refs knew they could not allow the play to stand, so they threw a flag for a tiny, insignificant hold of a player's jersey, the very definition of a flag that could be thrown on every single play of every single NFL game. Don't get me wrong -- the "hold" was there, and could clearly be seen on replay. It was just unbelievably insignificant, and for a stone cold fact far less meaningful to the play than you can see on Every Single Play by every single team of the NFL season. But make no mistake, if you watched this game, then you know that the referees were looking very hard for just that sort of thing to hang their hat on and further extend the game -- which again would have been ova if they had just done the right thing and called this play fairly -- because the refs knew just like everyone in the viewing audience that the Steelers obviously just didn't have the offensive prowess on Sunday night to do it on their own. So the refs barely watched the play where the Ravens essentially closed out the game for the second time in a few minutes, and instead simply stared hard at the line, waiting for the first instance of the kind of jersey gripping that happens in every game, on every play, and could not fall over themselves fast enough to throw that flag and take over control of the game. In the end, laughably, the Steelers still couldn't punch it in the end zone to give the refs the tie game they were really looking for on that drive, but rest assured if there was anything the officials could have done to get the Steelers 7 points, short of literally running up and pushing the runningback somewhere near the goal line so they could then "review" the play on replay and adjudge that he had crossed the plane, they would have. But their whole plan worked, they managed to keep the Steelers in the game just long enough for their best player to step up in a huge spot and make the game look like it was decided by the Steelers' amazing defense instead of by them. But again, thank god you have me so you know who really took care of things on Sunday night. The Steelers have been the beneficiary of four or five absolute gift wins just over the past two seasons, pretty much each one dumber and more unbelievable than the last. Somebody in organized crime out there must looooooove to bet the Steelers, I'll tell you what.

But that game wasn't even the worst example of the officials deciding all by themselves who won a crucial game on Sunday. In the Falcons - Buccaneers game, the Falcons had just come back from a 10-point deficit to take a 4-point lead with a few minutes to go, and the Bucs were driving back down the field, with Josh Freeman looking to lead his team on his 6th 4th quarter comeback of his short career. They were pretty much moving the ball at will on the Falcons' semiporous defense, whether the Falcons played for the run or the pass, whether they blitzed on defense or they hung back in the prevent. It just didn't matter, and if you were watching the game like I was then you had the same feeling as I did that the Bucs were going to win. They got all the way up to the Falcons' 30 yard line or so, and there were a full 2 minutes left, so timing wasn't an issue in the slightest. They did need a touchdown though, so running a few running plays to get 10 more yards and then brining in the kicker wasn't an option either. They needed to keep throwing the ball, which is exactly what Freeman did on the first play back from the 2-minute warning, tossing a nice out-route to the sidelines which Atlanta cornerback Brent Grimes made an awesome play on to cut in front of the receiver and make the diving interception. It was really a great, athletic play, with only one problem: on the replay, which was automatically reviewed because it was just into the final two minutes of the game, it was clear that Grimes did not actually catch the ball. And when I say it was clear, I mean it was clear -- like, the guy made the great, athletic dive, caught the ball, hit the ground and rolled over, where he clearly, irrefutably does not have control of the ball after all, and then as he continues rolling from his diving interception attempt, he eventually rolls over onto his stomach, and the replay shows without a shadow of a doubt that the ball is on the ground, with Grimes on top of it. He then completes the roll-over, regains control of the ball as he is lying on top of it -- in plain view of the instant replay cameras, mind you -- and gets up and starts to run it back as if he had actually intercepted the ball.

Now, everyone knows that the NFL has no interest in this no-name Buccaneers team making the playoffs, and with this Bucs' win in hostile territory, the Falcons' hold on the NFC South would be very much in doubt, but as I'm watching this one I'm thinking as I often do in these replay situations that the shitcock referees simply can't possibly find a way to take the ball out of the Buccaneers' hands in this one. I mean -- and I tried hard to find a replay of this phantom interception, to embed here, but so far nobody in bed with the NFL (ESPN, NFL.com, etc.) is man enough to even post this replay because it was that obviously another blown call -- there is a clear replay shot of the defender rolling over while bobbling the ball, and then rolling right on top of the ball as it is clearly sitting on the ground. But the refs come back from under the little hooded camera -- where I'm convinced there is some kind of a nude girl peep show or something since it's obvious these fuckclowns are not actually watching actual game replays under there -- and whaddya know, the call is upheld, the refs once again take the ball out of the hands of the team trying to drive to win it, and the Falcons take a couple of knees and the game is over, courtesy of some assclown in zebra stripes instead of the players on the fucking field.

It's gotten to the point where the game of picking the NFL matchups against the spread every week is more about which team is likely to get helped by the refs than about which team is more skilled or has any other intangibles. I knew the refs would be on the Steelers' side in that game, but I picked the Ravens -- my only loss of the week once again -- because I correctly determined that the Steelers would be worthless on offense given Ben Roethlisberger's injured foot (which looked pretty good Sunday in the end anyways). But how can you predict the referees giving the Steelers five downs twice in their second-to-last drive of the game, both in pretty ridiculous calls to do it? Anybody who picks against the Steelers ever again in the foreseeable future simply does so at their own risk, because you know you're not just picking against their opponents and the situation, but against the entire might and muscle of the NFL and despotic, whimsical, arbitrary totalitarian leader Roger Gooddell, who allows the officials to do whatever they can conceivably get away with to enforce what they believe his will to be.

When will these referees stop taking control of the games and deciding matchups themselves instead of letting the players on the field use their actual football skill to make actual football plays to decide these games? How much longer will Roger "Hypocrite Shitbag" Gooddell turns a blind eye to what his referees are doing to the games and to his sport? The pride cometh before the fall, you fucking asshole.

PS: Once again, I should mention that I am no kind of Ravens fan, I actually like the Steelers and have (correctly) predicted them to win the superbowl in the past couple of years, and of course I couldn't give less of a shit about the Buccaneers or the Falcons personally. This post has zero to do with a personal bias, of which you won't ever see me show any here, and everything to do with the integrity of the game, and with not wanting to invest three hours of my time and interest in a football game, only to see it outright decided by a bunch of fuckers with whistles in their mouths who spend their entire time on the field trying to stay away from the ball and the play at hand.

End of the Road

So, the baseball season has come to an end for my beloved Philadelphia Phillies. What can I say really....The 2010 NLCS was a case study in the old adage that great pitching prevails over great hitting in the playoffs. Without really dominating in any of the games, the Giants quietly went out and took two of three in Philadelphia, and two of three in San Francisco to return to their first world series since Barry Bonds led them there back in 2002. The pitching was pretty much stellar, with only Jonathan Sanchez getting slammed up hard by the team, and Bruce Bochy's coaching is highly underrated in my view as he managed to find a way to take a team that does not run the bases well, does not steal bases at all, and really has very little offense to speak of, and eke out three out of four wins in one-run games against the team that led the entire major leagues this year in record in one-run games. In a lot of ways, the Giants did to the Phillies this year what the Phillies have done to the Dodgers in the past two NLCS's. Where in the recent past it was Jimmy Rollins leading the time to the amazing 9th-inning walkoff rally, this year in the key Game 4 it was the Giants finding a way to hammer out a run off of Phillies' starting pitcher Roy Oswalt in a rare bullpen appearance.

While the above made the NLCS painful for me to watch in a lot of ways, nonetheless I will confess that I am left with the feeling that the Phillies are still the class of the National League. The Giants' lineup is a joke for a World Series team, and it is quite obvious that they live and die by their pitching staff alone. I mean, if not for Cody Ross -- he of the three regular season home runs and 18 rbis all year -- going absolutely bananas out of nowhere in this series, the Giants would not have scored more than 8 or 9 runs in the 6 game series, and they would not have had a chance even with the Phillies' bats slumping as they did in the series. Ryan Howard struck out 12 times in the NLCS, and had a mind-boggling zero home runs and zero RBIs in the entire series after recording 17 rbis in the 2009 NLCS. Chase Utley, another of the most clutch bats in the postseason over the past four years, was pretty much worthless at the plate in this series. Several times in the series, Carlos Ruiz and Shane Victorino came to the plate with runners in scoring position or even with the bases loaded, and they failed to come through in the clutch as they have so many times in the recent past. Now to be sure, a lot of this is directly related to the incredible, historic strength of the Giants' starting rotation as I wrote about before this series began. But the Phillies deserve a whole lot of the credit for sucking up the joint in this series, be it at bat, or in the field where they made several uncharacteristic errors from guys like Rollins, Howard, Utley and Victorino -- all basically gold glove-worthy fielders in their own right -- including single-handedly committing three errors in the field in the third inning of the decisive Game 6 to let in both of the runs given up by Roy Oswalt on the day The official records say Oswalt's strong performance was one ER in six innings, but it was clearly zero if you know your ass from first base about scoring a baseball hit.

Anyways, try as I might -- and I freely recognize that this may just be the Philly boy in me shining through -- I just can't shake the feeling that while we might very well be looking at the best pitching staff in the last few generations, we're just not looking at the best team in the NL here in the upcoming World Series. Unlike the ALCS, where I would say it was painfully obvious that the Rangers are in fact the superior team over the overmatched Yankees. I mean, for all the talk of how Cliff Lee has the Yankees' number, and how much of an advantage that gives Texas in a four-game series, the guy pitched exactly one time in the ALCS. Yes, he won his start and utterly shut down the Yanks in Game 3, but the guy barely had a hand in any of the actual games. And those games for the most part were not close. The Rangers thrashed the Yankees in this series. As I heard a caller say on sports radio sometime today, this was a 6-game series that felt an awful lot like a sweep. The Rangers are superior, they were far superior at both hitting and pitching than the Yankees, they made the Yanks look old, and ultimately the Bronx Bombers never had a chance in this series, an outcome which in the end just didn't surprise me much at all.

One thing I will say about the 2010 World Series -- this is yet another victory for the little guy, for the small market team that is not the Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies or Mets. Despite all the talk heading into the LCS series, in the end it was not the top-5 payroll Phils or the sick-spending Yankees prevailing to face off in the sport's biggest stage. Instead, we're looking at Texas and San Francisco, not exactly small market teams, but not close to the big spenders on the top end of the spectrum in the major leagues. The Giants' opening day 2010 payroll stood at $97.8 million, good for 10th out of 30 teams in the majors, while the Rangers' team payroll was a paltry $55.2 mil, placing them in 27th out of 30 teams in terms of money spent on their players. So while the Yankees and the Phillies continue to show that money can generally buy some modicum of success over a 162-game regular season, once again baseball has two relatively new and rare participants in the Fall Classic, including the first-ever franchise appearance for a Rangers team that looks to be on a major roll heading into the final series of the season.

Before I go, I would be remiss if I did not mention that fuckass referee in the Packers - Vikings game on Sunday night in NBC, as that dickwad stood right there on national, prime time weekend television and just plain decided to give Brett Favre another come from behind victory by calling Percy Harvin in-bounds on the field with just 48 seconds left in what was at the time a 4-point Packer lead. I mean, this muthafucker is paid to be an NFL referee -- getting these calls right is his whole job -- and this jackfuck stood right there, not two feet away from where the catch occurred, in perfect position, looking right at the play right down on the ground, and called Harvin in bounds. This despite Harvin not being touched or pushed on his way up, and even though Harvin actually got not two, not one, but zero feet in-bounds. Go watch the play if you care to, but I mean this guy's first foot landed mostly in-bounds but on review his heel was clearly touching the out-of-bounds line at the back of the end zone. Then the second foot landed, with the entire foot well onto the white line, so much so that you could even see the white outline in front of the foot because literally the entire foot was that far out of bounds. And then the body landed, also hopelessly on the white well past the back of the end zone. And yet that fucksniffing referee still just up and decided to make the call on the field a touchdown, making it that much harder for replay to overturn the call and keep Favre from another stunning comeback victory at Lambeau Field. As I've written about several times here on the blog, this trend of sports officials interjecting themselves into the game and making sure that they actually affect the outcome instead of just shutting up, sitting back and calling the game correctly. The bottom line is, that referee in Green Bay cannot possibly miss that call from as close as he was and in the perfect position he was in, unless he is predisposed towards taking over the game. That's just the way it is. That referee is an asshole and he should be removed from the game immediately.

OK, /end rant.

Cowboys over the Giants tonight. Tom Coughlin always has a way of surprising you on the downside after a couple of big wins. Bank it.