NFL’s problems extend to field, too

It struck me while watching the Packers-Bears game Sunday.

Forget the part about this not being my father’s NFL.

It’s not even my son’s.

He’s 16.

It’s difficult to assign the league any benefit of doubt, given the deplorable acts carried out by some of its players recently and the laughable and inconsistent response to them by the commissioner and his office.

But when it comes to an increase in yellow flags, I still believe the NFL thought that by calling more penalties this season, the game would eventually produce more action.

Instead, it has produced more questions.

“You still see plenty of mistakes by officials, and you still see some guys doing a decent job,” said Joe Fortenbaugh, writer for the National Football Post and co-host for Fantasy Sports Today. “Officials are never going to get credit when they do a good job and are going to get killed in bad spots.”

Joe knows football as well as anyone else, despite being an Eagles fan. There is also a chance he holds the world record for continuous talking without taking a breath. How this guy doesn’t have an endorsement deal with Starbucks or some other coffee chain is beyond me.

But his numbers on this particular issue are telling.

Fortenbaugh points out that there were an average of 14.9 penalties called in games two seasons ago.

Last season, the average was 14.01.

Through four weeks this season, it’s 16.73.

It’s a small sample. There is every chance that as the season moves forward, players will better understand what might be called and the average will fall to what two previous years produced.

There is every chance things will balance out.

Here’s the problem, and it’s hardly new to professional sports and those who officiate them: It’s a crew-by-crew matter, meaning we have games being called entirely different across the league each Sunday.

In a season when the NFL publicly stated its officials would take a harder stance on defensive holding and illegal contact, that sort of erratic judgment from one stadium to the next can make for frustrating times, from those coaching to playing to watching to, yes, betting.

“I really haven’t seen any one team get the raw deal of things or there being some sort of obvious bias beyond the season’s first game (Green Bay at Seattle), when they called nothing on the Seahawks,” Fortenbaugh said. “But there have been games that are absolute nightmares to watch, where everything is called. That’s no fun. But for the most most, if they’re calling it, both teams are getting hit with it.”

Four weeks into things, some calls or noncalls stand out more than others.

A few key ones:

■ Blowing the whistle too soon and not allowing a particular snap to play out in case of a turnover.

It cost Dallas a touchdown against New Orleans on Sunday and has done the same to other teams this season. It’s also one of the toughest plays for an official to call, given the speed of the game and the instinctual reaction to whistle a play dead.

“Sometimes, they might have been 15 yards down field and blown the whistle and not even realized there was a fumble,” Fortenbaugh said. “They literally need to rewire their brains and not react so quickly. Let it all play out and then come back and review if you have to. This is the one that’s driving me most crazy. Let the thing play out.”

■ Contact to the helmet.

In watching the Packers-Bears game, Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler was tapped harder on the helmet by teammates for making a good throw than when safety Sam Shields of Green Bay was flagged 15 yards at the end of a play in which Cutler slid to the ground.

Fact: I initiate more forceful contact opening a Blue Moon than Shields did to Cutler.

“I learned very early in law school that laws are put into effect so that at no time they become judgment calls,” Fortenbaugh said. “If you commit a crime, you broke the law. That’s it. The (NFL) doesn’t want to give its officials opportunities to make judgment calls.

“But they also need to realize what the intention of the rule is. A lot of times, there is no reason to call contact to the helmet. We’re also probably not talking about the brightest guys in the world here (as officials) who just don’t understand there is a gray area.”

■ The new rules.

It’s all the fault of the champs.

The NFL is your typical copycat professional sports league, which is why teams now hunger for lanky, 6-foot-2-inch defensive backs who can jam wide receivers at the line and not the 5-10 speedster of, well, before Seattle won the Super Bowl.

“I thought teams would just be crushed by these new defensive rules, but they haven’t been,” Fortenbaugh said. “The rules were supposed to kill Seattle. That hasn’t happened.

“Officials are still getting things wrong. They’re still far too (inconsistent). But if we’re sitting here in Week 7 and the number of calls is the same, then we can say there are too many flags being thrown. After just Week 4, it’s still really early to judge the officials as a whole.”

It’s not too early for this: It’s not my father’s NFL, not my son’s NFL, not any NFL of recent memory.

I’ve always hated yellow.

Clashes with the hair.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on “Gridlock,” ESPN 1100 and 98.9 FM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.