First, please nobody bring up the Seattle near touchdown catches and the Rothlisberger touchdown. Even if you think those are bad rules, they are easily understandable (two feet down inbounds and plane of the endzone, respectively) and the calls appeared likely to be correct as the rules exist. Also, can we stop talking about the Hasselback illegal block call. That call was obviously wrong but again the rule is easy to understand. It was just a bad call, one of hundereds every year. All the other calls in the game were debatable by reasonable people, although the bulk of them went against Seattle and may or may have not cost them the game.

The legitimate complaints coming out of the game are really because nobody seems to be able to figure out what conduct actually constitutes pass interference and holding. It all seems very arbitrary to even the most knowledgable football fans, and that is really the fuel behind the myth. Everyone's frustration is not that the pass interference call was bad or that the holding call was bad under the rules, though that's how it's articulated.

Nobody wants to admit that they don't have the slightest clue what constitutes holding and pass interference. I'll admit it; I don't have a clue. I've been watching this game since before the Giants played at the Yale Bowl and I have never been able to discern what exactly the officials are looking for on holding or pass interference. I, and almost everyone else I gather, use the old pornography "know it when I see it" standard, and to me those calls on Sunday don't meet that standard. I know the rulebook says one thing but that is simply not the way it has been called on the field in my lifetime. Every week I see pass intereference called on defenders who do nothing other than try to make plays on the ball and are actually interfered with by offensive players. Then I see offensive players get away with things that would be flagged in a New York minute if the defense did it. The rule as written may make sense, but as enforced it could not be more arbitrary and the calls on Sunday are just the culmination of my 30+ years of frustration in tryign to figure out what the hell constitutes pass interference and holding.

King is correct, many of these debatable calls may have been correct and are called from to time. But that's the problem. Why aren't they called all the time or not at all. The answer I guess is that Football is a tough game to officiate. There's simply too much going on for the officials to see it all and it happens too fast, and therefore, the same conduct gets flagged on one play but not the next, or more often, the next three times. This all makes it a frustrating game to watch as nobody likes watching a game knowing that there's a good chance what they're watching may not even count.

I guess there are no easy solutions. You can forget full-time officials. I have never been able to figure out and have never heard anyone actually explain why would make one bit of difference.

If the Colts or Patriots had won it all nobody would be talking about the mediocrity of the champion, we would be hearing all-time great team for both of them. The Steelers thrashed the Colts and decisively beat the team that decisively beat the Patriots. Nuff Said!

To all those who are arguing that good teams overcome bad officiating. Your argument is simply ridiculous in this context. The Seahawks played badly at times, so did Pittsburgh, but Pittsburgh didn't have to overcome bad officiating. What if holding had been called on the Parker touchdown. What if rothlisberger had been called for an illegal block on the Ward TD. These would have been bad calls. Could the Steelers have overcome that. I don't think so. Why hold the Seahawks to a different standard?

For those of you who are attempting to make absurd analogies between sports and real events please stop and go back from whence you came. Football is a game which people play and watch so that for a time during our lives we can enjoy ourselves by doing something which takes our mind off of our problems and the problems of others. For anyone who feels the need to bring Saddam Hussein, George Bush or Alberto Gonzalez into a sports discussion, think twice and then go to another website so that you don't subject the rest of us to your dose of unhappy reality

I care who wins some of the events, but I guess I just don't care enough to sit through hours of coverage to find out when a click of the mouse gets me the info a lot sooner. I guess it's kind of like the Australian Open or the Indy 500, I want to know who wins more than I want to watch it happen.

If I could watch the games live it would be a lot more exciting. But the pre-packaged focusing on the American athletes stuff just doesn't work anymore for me. I wonder if this will be the last olympics televised in this format. The Vancouver games probably can't be because of the time difference since the usual prime-time events will not have even happened when it's prime time in most of the country, and I doubt that in 2008 anyone is going to want to watch events in prime time when they heard the result 12 hours before.