Hey, let’s see if we can hit 100 whiny comments from Seattle fans about how they wuz robbed by the refs. The Seahawks loss obviously had nothing to do with the fact their entire team’s performance seemed to be phoned in (with the exception of the always-professional Joe Jurevicius [sp?], my vote for MVP had Seattle won), with the league MVP not managing a single memorable play (gaining 90 yards, four or five at a time, is a pretty good day, if you’re Ron Dayne), with a punter who never even tried to keep the ball out of the end zone, with an offense that couldn’t punch their way past an obviously gimpy Troy Polamalu, and with a head coach whose brain froze over with each two-minute warning!

My beef is not with the Seahawks, a very good team that I was actually rooting for all through the NFC playoffs. Had the Super Bowl gone the other way, I’m sure we would have heard just as much yowling about the injustice of it all from the Steeler fans. What bores the piss out of me is all this righteous hand-wringing about rules and penalties and how if you slow the video down to 1/24 speed you see that the receiver’s foot is exactly 1/8 inch out of bounds, and the coach should appeal.

C’mon, that was not what instant replay was intended for, not that it was a good idea to begin with. Because the outcome of one out of every 100 games is effected by an egregiously bad call, we now get half a dozen plays a game put under a microscope, just so the networks can sell more beer and Hummers. Pro football has become a game only a lawyer can love. What you see with your naked eye don’t mean a thing anymore, until validated by super slo-mo.

Just about any call can be deconstructed, if that’s what you care about. Take for instance Hasselbeck’s non-fumble, which everybody seems to agree was properly reversed. But Hasselbeck was touched before he hit the ground, not after, and there is no evidence that the contact caused him to go down. If he had broken a tackle at the fifty, run downfield and tripped over his own feet at the twenty, would he still be “down by contact?” As it was, I believe the correct call was made, but only because the officials used common sense, not because the rule as written was perfectly unambiguous.

On a completely different topic, if Seattle had won, the big story would have been Roethlisberger finally showing his youth. As cool as he’s been through the playoffs, he’s still a second-year QB with barely a full season’s starts under his belt. What you saw 80% of the time yesterday was major butterflies, a nearly Jake-Plummer-like performance—except, of course, when it really mattered, on the touchdown run, when everybody in the stadium knew a bootleg was coming, and when he tightrope-walked across the line of scrimmage before throwing to Ward. Imagine what he’ll be like when he matures!

A ref watching what in that moment he believes to be a penalty and not throwing a flag isn't "letting the players decide the thing" he's ignoring what he saw as a penalty. That's not their job. You call what you see. Even in the Super Bowl, and perhaps especially in a 0-0 1st quarter. Otherwise he should walk off the field and tell the other guys refs aren't needed, the players can decide things.

Besides which, I think the players did decide the game:

1-10-PIT16 (2:08) M.Hasselbeck pass to D.Jackson for 16 yards, TOUCHDOWN NULLIFIED by Penalty. PENALTY on SEA-D.Jackson, Offensive Pass Interference, 10 yards, enforced at PIT 16 - No Play.

1-20-PIT26 (2:00) S.Alexander right end to PIT 25 for 1 yard (C.Haggans).

2-19-PIT25 (1:18) S.Alexander left end to PIT 29 for -4 yards (L.Foote).

3-23-PIT29 (:35) M.Hasselbeck pass incomplete to D.Hackett (B.McFadden).

4-23-PIT29 (:27) J.Brown 47 yard field goal is GOOD

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2-10-SEA22 (4:47) B.Roethlisberger pass to J.Bettis to SEA 17 for 5 yards (A.Dyson). PENALTY on PIT-H.Miller, Offensive Pass Interference, 10 yards, enforced at SEA 22 - No Play.

2-20-SEA32 (4:21) B.Roethlisberger sacked at SEA 40 for -8 yards (G.Wistrom).

3-28-SEA40 (3:58) (Shotgun) B.Roethlisberger pass to H.Ward to SEA 3 for 37 yards (M.Boulware).

Penalties suck, but they aren't turnovers. A 1st and 20 (or 2nd and 20) isn't a death sentence, it's a opportunity for players to make plays. One team made plays.

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As an aside. I'd never seen a losing coach not meet the winning coach for the post game handshake at midfield before XL. Not exactly a classy moment for the Seattle franchise.

...I didn't see it on TV, so I've been catching up on NFL Network highlights to see what you saw. Some of the officiating seemed bizarre, but the officiating has been bizarre all year. Not excusing it, that's the case. I'm a Steelers fan, but I thought there were weird calls/no calls in both directions all night long and both sides had plenty to grouse about.

By the way, the city and people of Detroit did a killer job of managing the unruly crowds that descended on their layoff-wracked burg - well, most of them. All except the one pub - The Cock & Bull - that tried to jam me & my buddy for $50 (each) just to walk in and have some wings and a beer before we went to the game - so then it was off to the amazing Olympia in Greektown.

OK, I'm gonna watch Big Ben get that goofy Grizzly Adams beard of his cut on Letterman now...and by the way NFL: please please please, no more 2 week layoffs between playoffs and the Bowl - the teams get out of the rhythm of real play & too tight at the same time, a horrible combo that we saw at play last night.

I've been just accepting all day that Clark Haggans was offside on the Casey Hampton sack. But I just ran the replay. He wasn't offside. He moved before the snap, but he didn't move into the neutral zone until it had been snapped.

But now I'm confused: Are people saying he was offside on the sack or on the previous play, which was the completion to Stevens that was called back for the disputed hold on Haggans? On that one, it's a little harder to tell. He may have been offside, but I'd vote no. On super slo-mo, it looks like he's still on the defensive side of the neutral zone when the ball's snapped. But it's awful close. What makes it look a lot more obviously like offside is that he moves before any of the other Steelers.

That delay of game non-call was bad, when Roethlisberger signaled for timeout with the clock on 0. I'd actually forgotten about that. That happens fairly often, the clock reaching 0 and no penalty, but it's still bad, and this was a pretty bad example. It was on 0 for a second or two. I'd also forgotten about the block in Roethlisberger's back.

And yeah, Seahawks fan who said you haven't seen the block in the back on Roethlisberger but maybe that's Seattle blindness? That's Seattle blindness. It happens at the 35-yard line. Bryce Fisher pushes him from behind and sends him tumbling. And by the way: Gosh, Bryce Fisher is fast!

Every return of every kind has an illegal block in the back penalty call, except in the Super Bowl, in the open field, when the quarterback gets sent sprawling by a block in the back. Nice! Reminded me of that Nathan Vasher 107-yard FG return for the Bears. How can there have been no block in the back penalty? Watch the next time you see it replayed. There were like a dozen just counting the ones caught by the camera. Totally random enforcement on that dumb rule.

I realize I'm kind of sounding like a Steelers fan. I'm not a Steelers fan. I had no rooting interest in this game, and to the extent I might have, it would have been for Seattle, a West Coast team and the underdog. I just think the officiating was routinely problematic -- I've said before that I think the problem isn't the officials on the field but the insane hodgepodge of contradictory rules that are impossible to enforce correctly. I do think that Seattle was hurt more by bad calls than Pittsburgh. But I don't think it was a deciding factor.

Again, I don't think the refs are the problem, but if they were, how would it work to make it a full-time gig? First, what would they do all year? Train? Study? How much can you do that? And what's the gain? Again, I don't think their problem is ignorance of the rules or inability to keep up. It's timidity caused by instant replay and the crazy welter of rules.

Second, most of these guys have careers. How many of them are going to give up, say, their law practice or their insurance business to be a "full-time" ref, meaning they work the same 20-ish Sundays a year they always have, but now they have about 250 days of make-work? Not too attractive. You'd lose a lot of your best refs off the top. It would create more problems than it would solve, and I don't see it solving any.

MattD, I'm not aware of any Stanley Cup-like superstitions around any other trophies. Doesn't mean they don't exist, of course.

But what about Jackson (again!) appearing to score a touchdown but being called out of bounds?

People, can we get over the Jackson pylon touchdown? Two things:

1. Hitting the pylon with your foot does not a reception make. The rule is, two feet have to touch THE GROUND inbounds for it to be a catch. I don't know why the pylon is inbounds, but doesn't get you a completion if you have one foot inbounds on the ground and one on the pylon. But that's the way it is. Both feet have to hit the ground -- the ground -- inbounds. The pylon is not, to put it bluntly, the ground.

2. Even if the rule read the way people seem to want it to read, that would have been an incomplete pass. Jackson caught the ball, stepped inbounds with his left foot, stepped out of bounds with his right foot, then kicked the pylon with his left foot. He was out of bounds. It wasn't a catch.