Super Bowl LII Provided the Template for What a Better NFL Can Look Like
Gene Steratore always looks like he’s just been told a kickass joke but has to hold in his laughter for the sake of posterity. This is Steratore’s fifteenth year as an NFL official, and in that time he has presided over two different plays—the Dez Bryant non-catch and the Calvin Johnson non-catch—that you can rightfully use as Exhibits A and B in the NFL’s decline. For nearly a decade, the NFL has conspired to murder itself with arcane bureaucracy and endless replay stoppages in which every last bit of excitement is suckled out of the thrilling play that you, the viewer, just watched. I am now conditioned to expect the worst. I always have a “but…” in my back pocket. I am now, at all times, ready for a ref to take his headset off and deliver a ruling that will make me want to uppercut a brick wall. The game has turned ME into a ref, coldly looking at a fantastic display of athleticism and quietly thinking to myself, “Well, he caught it, but he didn’t catch it ENOUGH.”
If you go by the rules—and I swear there are actually rules for what does and does not constitute a catch in the NFL—Nick Foles’s 22-yard touchdown pass to R. B. Corey Clement (WHEEL ROUTE!) probably should have been overturned. I do not like thinking this. I do not like saying this. I feel like a snitch calling into a golf tournament. I cheered when Clement scored and then looked at the replay with growing dread. Clement bobbled the ball jussssst as his foot nicked the back of the end line. “Survive the ground,” etc. I fully expected it to come back, and so did the NBC crew. It was the sort of play that Steratore has reversed in the past.
Except this time, he didn’t. This time, he had to defer to Al Riveron up in the booth to make a ruling on the catch. This was the first time Steratore and Riveron worked a Super Bowl together. And it sure seems like the hugeness of the moment, and the fact that Riveron has crapped it all year long on this exact kind of call, conspired to force him to defer to Steratore’s judgment on the field. All I know is that Steratore ultimately went out there and announced a call that was technically incorrect but spiritually the rightest goddamn thing I’d ever seen. Nick Foles put an angel’s touch on that ball, and Clement caught the ball and got his feet down before juggling that shit. It was a touchdown. Cris Collinsworth shook his head and was left despondent, but whatever.
There was an even more crucial touchdown catch by Zach Ertz later on in the game that I also thought would be overturned, but again Steratore went to the booth, and again Riveron upheld it. As far as the NFL goes these days, it counts as an actual miracle that the refs didn’t shoot this game in the dick. Imagine if those touchdowns had been wiped out. Not only would the Pats have won (BARF), but the world would have pored over those two plays until the end of time and the rest of that game, save for maybe Nick Foles’s hilarious touchdown catch at the end of the first half, would have been forgotten. All of the game’s postgame discourse would have been fed into an endless, repeating loop of nitpicky horseshit.
Thank God that didn’t happen. You could almost see both refs simplifying the NFL rulebook in real time, and I can virtually guarantee that no matter how their bosses grade them for this game, they will gather up the Competition Committee this offseason and make sure there are more games like it.
Because this Super Bowl was glorious. It had more offense than any other Super Bowl in history. It had fewer punts than any other Super Bowl in history. It had more quarterbacks going out to catch the ball than any other Super Bowl in history. The refs called just seven penalties (just one on the Pats, natch), all of them of the shorter variety. Pats/Eagles provided a template for the NFL to end its own self-imposed freefall. And yeah, maybe there’ll still be rednecks who still tune out because they DURRRRR THESE PLAYERS DON’T SUPPORT MAH PICKUP TRUCK DURRRRR. But as far as the on-field product goes, Pats/Eagles delivered. And the more the NFL delivers on that end, the fewer excuses people will find to walk away.
This shit ain’t hard, man. Quality control in the NFL can be maintained just with more catches, fewer ticky-tack penalties, and fewer replay gangbangs. I don’t know why we have to wait until the goddamn championship round of a sport for the refs to step back and let the players play, but I hope the NFL finds a way to make that deference more widespread. They’ll probably blow it somehow, but for now I’ll take Super Bowl LII as a harbinger of a brighter, less annoying NFL future. God, that game was sweet. No wonder Steratore can’t stop smiling.
