How NFL Referee Gene Steratore Ushered in the End of Western Civilization
December 31, 2022
I just finished watching the end of the Michigan-TCU College Football Playoff game. I know in my heart that it was a great game, maybe a classic. But alas my team did not win. Despite multiple comeback attempts, the Wolverines lost 51-45 – by six points. As a lifelong fan of the New York Mets, I have adapted to move quickly past bad defeats, but every now and again there occurs one play that I just can’t let go. The particular play in this game that might prove problematic for me personally was a 50-yard Michigan touchdown pass in the second quarter that for some reason did not count as a touchdown. The Michigan receiver caught a long pass in the end zone, but the “replay officials” said he was down at the half yard line, first and goal. Of course, Michigan fumbled on the very next play, TCU recovered the ball, and Michigan never recovered in the game. Yes, the fumble was on Michigan, but remember that last play? Fuck if that wasn’t already a touchdown. Of course it was a touchdown. Everyone saw it. Everyone knew it. And it was actually called a touchdown on the field, at least until some unnamed and unaccountable authority, some person-entity-body-panel-star-chamber saw fit to overrule the call on the field. Did I mention Michigan lost by six points?
I might not be able to let this one go.
Which is not good, because the last time there was a play I could not let go still creates work for me to this day. That last play occurred on January 11, 2015. It was apparently almost eight years ago but it feels like eight seconds ago. Cut to a frigid day in Lambeau field, NFC Divisional Playoffs, late in the fourth quarter, Dallas Cowboys down by 5 to the Packers, when Dez Bryant caught a long yard pass from Tony Romo on 4th down and 2, setting up the Dallas Cowboys for a 1st and goal from the one yard line. It was an athletic catch in mid-air over a Packers defender with the game on the line. It was almost heroic. The Packers challenged the call on the field because they had to. It was a clear catch – go watch it – but NFL referee Gene Steratore decided to overturn the call on the field, a determination that is regarded – by me – to be the Worst Call in NFL History. As you might have guessed, the Cowboys lost.
I was so confused and enraged by that call, that in the following days I wrote a collection of short essays commenting on the event. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) But the writing didn’t make me feel any better. So, every year on the anniversary of that play, I have mailed one of these essays to Gene Steratore. Well, not to Gene Steratore directly, but, if Wikipedia is to be believed, to the Sanitary Supply Company that he apparently co-owns with his brother in rural Pennsylvania, Attention Gene Steratore. For the record, I will continue to send my annual missive to the Steratore family as long as I keep seeing Gene Steratore show up on my TV every Sunday during the NFL season as the “rules analyst,” so called. “Gene, you’re responsible for the Worst Call in NFL History, why don’t you tell us YOUR expert opinion on the last play call.” It’s like hiring Plaxico Burress as your resident gun safety expert.
Back to today, the last day of 2022, this Michigan game got me thinking. Two hours after the game, I already know in my heart that I will not be able to let it go, just like I have been unable to shake off the Gene Steratore call after almost a decade. Why? What do both calls have in common? And what do they represent in the larger cultural, intellectual and philosophical context? And why on earth does the first question lead to the last one? It wasn’t until the Michigan call tonight that I realized why the Steratore play affected me so profoundly, and what it represents.
Sports officials make mistakes all the time. Sometimes they make sensory mistakes. They don’t see the play properly. Their eyes and brains fail to accurately calibrate what is before them. A pitcher’s perfect game is no longer a perfect game. In the stress of the moment, they fail to throw a flag after obvious defensive pass interference in the NFC Championship game. Sometimes they make mistakes in judgment in real time. They call a ticky-tack holding penalty to kill a two minute drive. They call an infield fly rule prematurely. I do not write letters to any of these officials. For the most part, they were doing their jobs in good faith and messed up. Sometimes the officials themselves recognize that they made a mistake and I even feel bad for them.
Here’s the problem with the Dez Bryant catch. And it happens to be the same problem I have with the Michigan catch. These were both seemingly obvious catches that were ruled completions by the officials on the field. The point of any replay appeal, in all contexts, is to double-check, to make sure, and to overrule the play on the field only if there is clear evidence that the officials on the field got it wrong. Yet in each of these dreadful examples, there was someone holding that position of power, and that someone just had to exert that extra bit of power. Deferring to someone else is not power. Overruling someone else, now that’s power. In each case, they had to go out of their way to find a reason to overturn those calls, only by micro-analyzing the play at an increasingly atomic level, such that the basis of the decision has been completely divorced from the act of a man catching a ball. It seems like this has now become the default rule for the sports replay review process. There is never any real deference. Both reversal calls were made with the smug certainty of a person who believes they were endowed and ordained to make that decree. There is something all too familiar about the experience, isn’t there? Who among us does not encounter this very sort of arbitrary exercise of power in everyday life? Ever been to the DMV? What about your trusted Human Resources department? What about an airport? What about the bank? What about, oh I don’t know, everywhere?
It is the smug certainty of the bureaucrat, the apparatchik, the technocrat. The technocrat, as the appointed “expert” with the power to decide, clearly knows better than everyone what is and what is not a football catch, and is not only willing to take that position, but will, by the power vested in them, overrule everyone else in the world, including the other officials on the field, to prove the implicit correctness of that position.
To make matters worse, it seems like everyone just accepts this as a fact of existence. Sure, the fans and players who lost will reliably gripe, but in the broader public conversation, this is chalked up as partisan noise. Like all other discourse, it is just a comment to be regarded or disputed. “Yes, the call could have gone the other way, but everyone gets screwed all the time. Move on. It didn’t affect the game. The team lost the game, not the refs. What about that other call that went your team’s way? Either way, that’s not as bad as what happened to my team. Remember that time…” Shut up, you’re missing the point.
I have little doubt that Gene Steratore stands by his call to this day. The NFL certainly does. Why else would post-retirement Gene Steratore be the official rules expert during every CBS NFL broadcast? If he was in any way embarrassed by that call, if he understood himself to have made THAT mistake in THAT game, only a sociopath would shamelessly present himself to the nation in that role every week.
No. The person and mentality that led to the Dez Bryant call is neither hidden nor shamed. They are both celebrated. Even those who believe the result was unfair do not blame the person or the process – in this case, they blamed the rule. Remember all that talk about the Calvin Johnson rule? Bad rule, right call? Bullshit. As if Gene Steratore had no choice in the matter. Gene Steratore had to willfully ignore that Dez took three steps after catching the ball, that he transferred the ball from one hand to the other, and that he then stretched the ball out toward the goal line, all in order to apply what everyone already regarded as a shit-ass rule in the first place. Look, Gene Steratore might well be a kind and decent human being. And sure, his and his family’s annual decision not to report me to the authorities definitely tilts in their favor. But in that moment Gene Steratore, operating under the cover of the system that granted him that authority, and in clear contradiction with our sense of sight and collective understanding of fairness, told us in no uncertain terms that he was right and we were wrong. There may be official authority within the rules that allows an NFL referee to overturn a ruling in the wake of a coach’s challenge, but what is the moral law that leads someone to act in that manner? On that play? Not in the heat of the moment, mind you, but with precious long minutes to assess, reflect and deliberate. What are the systemic incentives that motivate otherwise good people to effectuate such clear inversions of perception, morality and fairness? Hannah Arendt can probably fill up six treatises trying to answer that question.
There is currently a powerful sense across the land that the state of Western Civilization is not exactly on an upward trajectory. I’m not going to get into the details, but, depending on who you ask, most people will tell you that things are bad, that they are getting worse, and that one particular group is largely to blame for the problems. The upshot is that today people are way less optimistic than they used to be. I’m pretty sure I used to be an optimistic person, too, but at some point in my adult life, I started to feel like things were maybe starting to break apart. Little by little, year after year, from one Mets season to another, picking up steam. As I sit here tonight, I realize that January 11, 2015 might have been one of the key days in that deterioration of hope – the realization that we live in a world where a Gene Steratore, and those like him, can exercise their authority like that, under those circumstances, without apparent consequence, and there’s nothing we can fucking do about it. “After review, it has been determined that the receiver did not maintain possession of the football,” so proclaimed with the passive, impersonal voice of the executioner. Turn on your TV during football season, and there’s a good chance you will see the bubble with Gene’s smiling “Go fuck yourself, America” face, Gene-splaining to us why the superhuman Keelan Cole catch in the end zone was actually incomplete. You have to squint pretty hard to not to see the larger metaphor here: an obvious injustice, gratuitously and arbitrarily inflicted upon (of all teams) America’s Team, by an apparatchik who was not only completely unaccountable for his transgression, but ultimately rewarded and promoted for exercising this particular brand of modern sociopathy.
And the worst part about tonight? Since the Michigan touchdown was reviewed and overturned by the faceless-nameless replay booth, I don’t even know where to send my annual letter.