Bad Call

By Crispin Sartwell

The calls have been, as the saying goes, questionable. In San Francisco, the New York Giants lost a playoff game when, after a bad snap on the last play of the game, a field goal attempt, the holder improvised a pass. The Giants were called for an illegal man downfield, and the game was over. As the NFL acknowledged, there should also have been a pass interference call against the 49ers, and the down should have been replayed.

In Nashville, in sudden death overtime, the Titans missed a field goal. But they got another chance when the referees called roughing the kicker on the Steelers, though there was minimal contact and perhaps what in basketball would be called a "flop," a bit of acting on the part of the kicker. The second kick was good, and the Titans won.

It is unfortunate that what in both cases were magnificent football games should be decided on those calls, and the losing coaches in both cases were angry and distraught. Indeed, Steelers coach Bill Cowher looked ticked off enough to be contemplating homicide or perhaps genocide.

But both games were the sorts of human events that often come down to irrational and unpredictable decisions: both were dead heats, as it were, balanced on a knife's edge, so even that anything could tip the balance. You might recall that the last presidential election was also a dead heat, was also decided by the refs, and that the call there was also questionable.

NFL referee might be one of the few jobs harder than Supreme Court justice. And it's also more thankless; at least Supreme Court justices, having risen to the top of jurisprudence, are widely venerated, whereas NFL referees remain unnoticed if they do well, and are universally reviled when they screw up.

It's a sad fact that human beings make judgments, and human judgments are often mistaken. The governor of Illinois has had a pretty rude awakening about that of late, and has emptied death row because of some signal mistakes, mistakes that have most probably led to the execution of innocent people.

In every walk of life, human beings commit errors that occasionally rise to the level of the catastrophic: "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones," for example, or Michael Jackson's face, to say nothing of his personality, or "Kangaroo Jack," or Trent Lott's hairpiece, to say nothing of his personality, or "Man Against Beast," or "The Bachelorette," or Justin Timberlake's hair, or the JFK Jr. biopic, or decaf latte, or crack cocaine, or Cosmo, or Liberia, or AOL, or the discovery of America, or the Roman Empire, or the St. Louis Browns, or gambling, or the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party, or the poetry of John Ashbury, or the Windows operating system. Indeed, even God, whose infallibility is proverbial, seems to have created foot fungus and John Ashcroft.

It is indeed annoying that people and divinities other than myself make mistakes. But though I might wish that you could be perfect, perfection is impossible and boring. Perfect people could not compete at football at all, much less lose a game on a bad call.

An NFL referee makes instantaneous judgments concerning the extremely complex actions of extremely fast people. And that, we might say, is in capsule the human condition, whether we're trying to figure out whether to change lanes or to free Mumia abu Jamal, whether to buy the latest J-Lo album or pull the trigger, whether to drink a beer or quit the job, whether to make love or go home, whether to open that door or seek therapy, whether to put on that shirt or fill that prescription, whether to spank or smile indulgently, whether to tell the truth or hock the ring. We're going to make mistakes, and that's liable to get people angry.

The phrase "human error" is, I'm afraid, redundant. It would be better if we were better. But we aren't.