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Learn to love the NFL replacement referees in 420 words

Posted By Ian Micir On In advice,sports | 3 Comments

You’re not going to win this one. The replacement refs are here, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of progress being made between the NFL and the League of Extraordinary Officials Who Can Actually Figure Out Where to Spot a Ball Within Eleven Minutes. But this doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy football. Don’t get mad, get glad. Here’s how:

It’s simple math. Unless you’re some strange breed of passive sports fan, you have a team that you root for and all other teams can go to hell. So if that’s true:

Teams you root for = 1

Teams you root against = 31

These replacement refs are going to blow calls — obvious calls, even after looking at the replay — that will impact your team negatively. That’s a pill you’re just going to have to swallow. But, what’s often forgotten in the common perception is that there will be far, far more calls that go against teams that you hate than there will be calls that go against teams that you love (recall: 1:31 ratio). And that, friends, is a wonderful thought.

It’s worth acknowledging that if two hated teams are playing in the same game, then a bad call for one would be a good call for the other. This might seem to imply that the situation is a wash.

Wrong.

While the call itself works out to a wash, the kicker (think: high card in poker, not ‘guy on the team with the stupid face mask’) is the looks on the faces [1] of the less fortunate team. Take Sunday (9/23) night’s game, for example. Is there anything sweeter in all of sports — New Englanders and frontrunners excluded — than watching Bill Belichick’s face [2] contort in disbelief as a blown call (or five) happen to go against the Patriots? Ah, the euphoric, karmic joy of watching a man whose team was caught cheating being cheated out of a call. Those are the moments that make poorly officiated sports worth watching. Babies giggle, homophobia and racism are set aside, Palestinians and Israelis high five one another, and an extraordinarily bitter man in a grey hoodie cringes inside and out as he discovers, at the hands of a replacement referee, that not only is he not God, but that God doesn’t even root for the Patriots.

Sure, we’d like to watch some actual football with properly enforced rules and timely decisions at some point this season, but until then, let’s make the best of a bad situation.

Sports hatin’ just got way more fun. All aboard!

 

Update: God also does not root for the Packers (see: Monday Night Football on 9/24).

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Ian Micir [6]

Ian Micir is associate editor of When Falls the Coliseum. He graduated from Drexel University with a BA in English in June of 2012. During his time at Drexel, he won ten awards for writing, including five in his final year. Micir’s work has appeared in The 33rd – An Anthology [7] and The Classical [8].