Armchair Lawyers? (NFL rules don’t make sense)

The last minutes of the Dallas Cowboys vs. the Buffalo Bills game on Monday, October 8, 2007 were nerve racking, exciting, disappointing, and somewhat heart stopping no matter what side of the score you were on but I would hardly call the majority of the excitement “sport.” What I saw was a lot of legalese to determine the outcome of a game, which in its waning moments became a drama akin to Law & Order: Special Football Unit – entertaining, still, but not in a sportsy way.

In brief, the events as I saw them (starting with the Cowboys’ last touchdown): Touchdown; pitiful two point attempt with good defensive stop; Dallas made an onside kick that actually worked; wait it is the last five minutes of the game so we better check and make sure because this is so important that I have to go hide under sheet; ok yeah we were right the first time; completed pass for good kicking field position; Dallas spikes the ball to stop the clock; wait that pass game them position to make a field goal so this is important and we should review the play that was previous to the spike play; ok I guess he didn’t catch the ball so put all that time back on the clock and do-over; the pass is caught again for sure this time; Dallas makes the long field goal to win the game and everyone in Texas is happy; just kidding, Buffalo called time out just prior to the snap to “ice” the kicker; do-over; the kick is good, again, and everyone in Texas is happy.

This is why football frustrates me sometimes. I watch sports to see athletes do stuff that I am incapable of due to the somewhat gimpy nature of several of my limbs and general lack of commitment any single task for too long. I do not watch sports to see them indulge overpaid whiny men when they don’t get their way. Of course I care when I see a bad call that adversely affects the well being of my team but I figure the other team’s fans are having the same problems so it all comes out in the wash.

There is no reason a game should ever be so complex that the rules change depending on how much time is left and officials have the option to look back on their calls and interpret the reviews with the same consistency as a drunken Supreme Court judge interpreting the Constitution after a week long coke and peyote bender. Referees make bad calls because they are human and that is part of the game and it should go on because it really isn’t so important that play should stop while half the country yells at their TVs for one side of the call or the other.

To be fair, football isn’t the only offender of this new tendency to allow players to whine about bad calls and actually get headway (often in the form of new rules allowing review stoppage). Tennis has introduced a challenge system and for a fast paced game like tennis to do this is even more criminal than allowing the snail pace of football to slow down even more.