A former NFL front-office executive said Tuesday he remained skeptical that the public outcry over the missed call Monday night would lead the NFL to make major concessions in the negotiations with the locked-out referees to get them back on the field.
“They are a reactive group,” the former executive said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. “They do react to what’s on the [television] networks, what’s in the newspapers. But with money, they can dig in. They consider this group they’re dealing with [the referees] to be unreasonable. I don’t think they’ll cave in. They’ll compromise, but they won’t cave in.”
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The Post Sports Live crew discusses the fallout following another blown call in an NFL game, this time costing the Green Bay Packers a victory in Seattle on Monday night, and whether or not this will be the tipping point that forces NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to settle the labor dispute with the regular referees.
One person familiar with the league’s deliberations over the catch said there is no mechanism that would enable the league to reverse the call by replacement officials that gave the Seahawks the victory. The NFL’s rule book says that teams cannot protest the outcome of a game.
The rule book does give NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell the authority to reverse a game’s result or order it replayed from any point if an “extraordinary act” has occurred.
But the rule book appears to limit the commissioner’s authority to take such a step to “any club action, non-participant interference, or calamity [that] occurs in an NFL game which he deems so extraordinarily unfair or outside the accepted tactics encountered in professional football that such action has a major effect on the result of the game.”
The rule book says the commissioner “will not apply his authority in cases of complaints by clubs concerning judgmental errors or routine errors of omission by game officials. Games involving such complaints will continue to stand as completed.”
Former NFL offensive lineman Ross Tucker said an erroneous call by the replacements that decided a game was bound to happen sooner or later.
“I think the biggest shame of it is that anybody with half a brain could see this coming,” said Tucker, who played for the Washington Redskins, Dallas Cowboys, Buffalo Bills and New England Patriots. “If you watched the preseason games, if you watched the first two weeks of regular season games, it was inevitable.”
Tucker said he thinks the controversy could spur a resolution between the league and the regular officials.
“I do think they’ll get something done in the next few days because of the pressure,” Tucker said. “But it’s so frustrating, because why did it have to come to this? This could have been done last week. Maybe the league was hoping this wouldn’t happen, or it wouldn’t be this bad if it did happen. But you could see it coming from a mile away. They could have avoided this train wreck and yet they chose not to.”
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