Home / General / Super Bowl XL: More Thinkin’ <i>And</i> More Whinin’!

Super Bowl XL: More Thinkin’ And More Whinin’!

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Since it came up in comments, this empirical data about the effect of the officiating in Super Bowl XL is useful.   Overall, you can read actually the bottom line as ammunition for the “get over it” faction, in this sense: the offensive pass interference penalty on Jackson was the only penalty that was both high-impact and outrageously bad.   (And I still I have absolutely no patience with claims that the call was defensible.  Incidental shoulder contact that doesn’t prevent the defender from making a play or create separation is — and should — be called roughly 0.0% of the time.)    The call on Hasselbeck went beyond bad into surreal, Denis Morel-level stuff — I think it’s reasonable to expect an NFL official to be able to tell the difference between blocking and tackling — but the impact was modest.   The Locklear hold, which had a huge impact, is more complex.   I don’t think it was a good call, in the sense that it’s the kind of hold will be called less often than not.  But it was a de jure hold, and the arbitrary nature of holding penalties is something you just have to live with.   It just felt worse because it negated a huge play and occurred in the middle of a series of marginal calls that went against the Seahawks.    And the Roethlisberger TD I don’t think was a bad call at all.   Or, more precisely, the replay call wall clearly right because there wasn’t definitive evidence, and while I would have said he didn’t break the plane if you asked me to call it one way or the other, given that the replays aren’t definitive it’s reasonable to defer to the official.

So, as I’ll return to in another post, there are limits to how much the Seahawks can complain — it’s not as if the calls put them in a position they couldn’t have overcome, and only two of them were really awful.  On the other hand, there’s no serious question that poor officiating (with the addition of the fact that every major marginal call went against one team) had a major impact on the game — which given that the Seahawks lost while outgaining the Steelers by 60 yards and being +1 in turnovers is pretty obvious.

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