How the Experts are Ruining the NFL

And Why We Are to Blame

January 11, 2025 marks the 10-year anniversary of the worst officiating call in NFL history, and one of the gravest injustices in the history of organized sports. I call upon all football fans, whichever team you root for, to observe a one-minute moment of silence at 4:00 p.m. ET on that day. This will comprise my annual written submission to former referee Gene Steratore, which will be mailed to his place of business as per usual practice. I regret beyond words that in the ten years since that frigid afternoon at Lambeau Field, we have failed to regain any control of the game from this cabal of clueless officials.

There is a larger story going on in the world about how experts, so-called, eventually ruin everything. There is something to be said for this point of view, but that is a discussion for another day. For now, this is a smaller story about how experts are in fact ruining one of my favorite things in the world, NFL football. The experts here are the officials, and sadly, I believe we get the officials we deserve.

Let’s start with a pop quiz. In the NFL, what is the punishment for an offensive holding penalty?

Ten yards back from the spot of the foul, right? Yes, but that’s only half the story. The other half is usually unspoken but often much more severe. The most crucial consequence of the holding penalty is that whatever just happened on the play no longer happened. It didn’t count. The World Clock is rewound as if the events that transpired on that play are erased from existence. Justin Jefferson made a miraculous one-handed catch in traffic? No, he didn’t. The left tackle was flagged for holding. You must be mistaken, sir. You wouldn’t know it based on how freely and often the penalty is called, but offensive holding is a very big deal.

Offensive holding is one of those penalties that generally occurs in the midst of the chaos where the team’s offensive and defensive lines converge. In general, it is the use of the hands or arms to materially restrict an opponent or alter a defender’s path or angle of pursuit. In the madness of an NFL mashup, how can you tell what’s holding and what’s not? How can you tell what’s material and what’s not? The answer is that all of this occurs on a continuum and the officials decide where to draw the line.

Next question. What is the penalty for defensive pass interference in the NFL?

The offensive team is rewarded possession of the ball at the spot of the foul, as if the forward pass did not fall to the ground but was actually caught by the intended receiver at the very place where he was on the field. They even throw in an automatic first down to boot. Much like the offensive holding penalty, it’s pure magic, except the magic here is that it brings into being an imaginary future, as opposed to just erasing the past. Much like holding calls, these penalties are wholly within the discretion of each individual official, and almost always have a huge impact on the game.

With this background in mind, let me state what may or may not be obvious. There are far too many questionable penalties called in the NFL, and the majority of them are for offensive holding and defensive pass interference. If you do not believe this to be the case, then I believe you are either watching an entirely different game than I am, or, more likely, you have adopted the mindset that fosters the flourishing of these types of penalties in the first place. That mindset will be addressed below.

If you have any doubt about the sense information being transmitted to your brain through your eyes and ears, let’s go right to your brain. Here, if you are a regular viewer of NFL football, you might have noticed that your brain has recently adopted a new acronym into your sports vocabulary. That acronym is “DPI.” It stands for, what else, “defensive pass interference.” That’s right. This is a penalty that’s always been around, but because it is called so often nowadays, we can’t even say the whole thing anymore. We therefore needed to shorten it up.

Admittedly, some of my heightened sensitivity to these types of penalties can be attributed to the emergence of the NFL RedZone channel, one of the greatest sports innovations in the last generation. This channel takes all the Sunday afternoon games and masterfully organizes the content to only show the most exciting and relevant action in real time, all without any commercial breaks. Thus, RedZone has not only eliminated the bloated commercials from the NFL viewing experience, but has also removed the other glaring flaw in today’s game: the penalties.

Whenever I sit down to watch a singular NFL game, I am left dumbfounded by not only the sheer number of penalties, but the way they are seemingly called gratuitously, at all stages of the game, close call or not, usually regardless of the context and regardless of whether they impacted the play or not. The officials are supposed to ensure the fairness of the competition, but their penalty calls, seemingly by design, do not take into account whether the offending team actually obtained an advantage (i.e, that they cheated), just that a rule has been violated. They are so ubiquitous that it seems as if no one reacts anymore. They are just casually regarded, by the players and announcers, as just part of the game. Yesterday, for example, the NFL “action” featured a game with huge playoff implications in which the officials called 20 penalties. Twenty. Does the official who throws the most flags win a trip to Cancun? Does second place get a set of steak knives?

(Embedded in this criticism is the suggestion that there must be more penalties being called today than there were in the past. The “expert” mindset would immediately dive into the statistics to test the theory. I understand the reflex, I do, but that’s actually not the point. The point is that calling too many penalties degrades the fan experience, and if you agree in your heart, don’t fall into the trap of allowing your brain to distort what your eyes and ears are telling you. That is how the experts operate, they justify their conduct by flooding the zone with data. Don’t do it. The truth is I haven’t checked, and I won’t. That’s because I didn’t say there were too many as compared to the past. I just said there were too many, period.)

Every organization and institution, as they mature, grows increasingly reliant on a class of experts, and these experts in turn rely on a hierarchy of baby experts, also called bureaucrats, to administer their expertise. Today’s officials are those baby experts. There are seven of them on the field during each play, and if it was up to them, there would probably be 70. Some of their jobs are literally to just look for a particular kind of penalty, like the downfield officials who walk the Earth solely to sniff out pass interference. In this day and age, the last thing you want to do is give an expert the unfettered ability to demonstrate their knowledge.

If you’ve spent any amount of time listening to the head officials over the years, the bosses, the Dean Blandinos, you would quickly understand that the officials on the field are exercising the exact level of discretion slash non-discretion that is expected of them. For example, listen to this snippet from our old friend Mike Pereira, who literally used to run the NFL’s officiating program, but now acts as the “Rules Analyst” on FOX game broadcasts. Here he is defending the controversial defensive holding penalty that ruined the end of Super Bowl LVII for everyone, especially Eagles fans.

Here is the money quote, when asked about whether officials should take into consideration the game situation in determining whether or not to call a particular penalty.

“You can’t officiate the game that way, and if you do, and I would say this, if there was any single official that, when I was running the officiating program, that felt that way, and officiated that way, in other words, that I’m not calling anything in the last minute of the game of Super Bowl 57, or whatever, I’d fire his butt right after the game.”

There you have it, folks, in a nutshell.

Football officials might not come to mind when we think about what an “expert” looks like, but to me they exhibit all the hallmarks.

First, they believe themselves to have specialized knowledge that is inaccessible to the rest of us. The NFL rule book is incredibly complex and convoluted, which is all the better for this mini-professional class to thrive.

Second, blessed with this specialized knowledge (here, presumably, “Referee School”), experts suffer from an irresistible compulsion to impose themselves on the world at large. What better way to demonstrate your power and prove your mettle than to throw a yellow piece of cloth, which yellow piece of cloth has the ability to magically transform time and space in the game you are charged with overseeing? These are the same people who enjoy sending you home from the DMV because you used blue ink instead of black ink.

Third, experts enjoy air cover by virtue of the rules, such that they can never have personal accountability for the choices they make, even though they relish in the power that is attendant to their authority to enforce said rules. They speak in terms of regulations and standards and policies and uniformity, and they always sound like lawyers, as do the people who rush to defend them at every turn.

Fourth, experts always answer first and foremost to those in their own group, never to the people they are intended to serve. They judge themselves based on the standards and expectations set by the others in their group, not by reference to the purpose for which the group was created.

This all adds up to one and only one animating principle, the One Ring to Rule Them All: “We know better than you.”

This is the “in-your-face” quality that drives the wedge between the officials and the people, here, the fans. Even though they are charged with ensuring the fairness of the competition and therefore preserving the integrity of the game for our benefit – don’t forget that we the fans are the consumers here – they either ignore us or have outright disdain for us.

For me, the canary in the coalmine was former NFL referee Gene Steratore.

I’ve spilled enough ink writing about this man, but Gene Steratore was the referee who, “upon further review,” determined on January 11, 2015, that Dallas Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant actually didn’t catch a ball that he clearly did catch. Gene Steratore did this in the final minutes of a classic playoff game and it ended up deciding the outcome. He didn’t make a mistake in the moment. He reversed a call made by another official and he stands by the call to this day. He was the referee who personified the “we know better than you” ethos more than any human being since the beginning of time, that your eyes and my eyes and all of our eyes were not to be believed. He was the one who would see for us.

With the anger now behind us and onto the page, let’s get to the sad part. In the ten years since Gene Steratore gave up the game and showed everyone how the officials see the world, nothing has changed. Sure, the NFL changed one of the rules about what constitutes a catch, but the NFL has since utterly failed to rein in the officials. In my opinion, we only defer to them more.

That is because the one tried-and-true check on the officials, the thing that used to hold them to account more than anything else, was public opinion, the unified voice of the fans. Nothing like that exists today. The chatter class of sports is comprised almost entirely of partisans, and everyone seems to speak in the same legalese used by the experts. Professional sports commentary (television, radio, podcasts, you name it) is structured to create conflict – point and counterpoint – and awards controversial opinions, no matter how uninformed or unhinged. Any rightful outrage simply gets lost in the noise.

As for the rank and file, since everyone has a stake in the outcome of each game, whether as a fan, a gambler, or a fantasy sports enthusiast, no one ever rises above their immediate interest to ask whether any of this good for the game in the long run. For every questionable call, one team is prejudiced and the other team is benefited. Ask a Chiefs fan whether the flag on the Eagles defender should have been called at the end of the Super Bowl. Watch the lawyers at work. For the experts, as long as the data shows that penalties are being called against both teams, they are doing their job and things are fair. This is not what fair means.

Watch any game. While holding calls have an arbitrariness to them, so many defensive pass interference penalties are unfair on their face. The quarterback is under pressure, he throws a deep ball up into the sky, an under-thrown death spiral. The defensive back commits the cardinal sin of not turning around in time and makes incidental contact with the receiver and the pass falls incomplete. The prima donna quarterback who just threw up the duck — take your pick, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Patrick Mahomes — raises his hands in protest. What do we the fans do in that moment? We look for the flag! We expect the flag. And we don’t always process that the offense was just awarded for doing everything wrong. All quarterbacks believe there’s pass interference or defensive holding on every play. They don’t seem to realize that this isn’t practice, and that there are eleven guys on the other side that don’t want them to complete passes. They are content to rely on the trigger-happy officials to complete those extra passes for them.

It should be us, the fans, who throw up our hands in protest.

With ten years of hindsight, the most frustrating thing about the Dez Bryant incident was that in the days after the game, there was so much chatter – about the rule, about the number of steps, about how there were other plays in the game that actually determined the outcome of the game (which, by the way, is the dumbest and most obvious “look over there” argument that apologists make all the time) – but there was no unified outrage. People were so blinded by their rooting interest (or, in this case, their disdain for the Dallas Cowboys) that they not only didn’t respond to the injustice, they didn’t even see it. If history has taught us anything, in addition to “you can kill anyone,” it’s that injustice, once accepted into a human institution, corrupts everything.

All you need to see is how the NFL reacted to Gene Steratore’s overreach. Did they fire him? Criticize him? Nope. They promoted him. He’s now the “Rules Analyst” on CBS, the public voice for the We-Know-Better-Than-You Crew. And everyone listens to him like he’s the Oracle at Delphi. We’re such losers. Blame ourselves.

What’s the solution? Ahh, therein lies the rub—actually, I take that back. It’s pretty easy. We just need to have the backbone to have the following conversation:

NFL: You call too many penalties. We think you guys should call fewer penalties.

Officials: What do you mean “fewer?”

NFL: Let’s say by half. Yeah, that sounds about right. Cut out about half the penalties.

Officials: What?! By what new standard shall we call “fewer penalties?” Holding is holding and DPI is DPI. Do you want to change the rules?

NFL: No. We don’t need to change the rules. You know how you guys call penalties and sometimes they’re Definitely penalties and sometimes they’re Maybe penalties? Just don’t call as many Maybes anymore. Especially at the end of the game. And especially at the end of the Super Bowl. Got that?

Officials: But what is the standard?

NFL: Well, the way we see it, each of these penalties is already the result of a judgment call. Like, did the potentially offending act materially affect the events of the play? Turn the sensitivity meter down by half, and you should have half the number of penalties. We think the game will still be very fair and you will definitely improve the game for everyone.

Officials: But what if Patrick Mahomes points at us and wants a penalty?

NFL: Don’t call it.

Officials: But what if Patrick Mahomes throws his hand up in the air because he wants a penalty?

NFL: Same answer. Don’t throw the flag.

Officials: What if he throws both hands up in the air?

NFL: Same answer.