I have gone 404 blogs without talking sports, so I kind of thought I was due. The fact that I kept up with the number of blogs without talking sports should be informative. It should tell you that I'm a non-truth teller (I have no idea how many blogs in a row I've done without talking sports), and it should tell you that leaving sports behind has been an issue unto itself.
I digress, before I've ever begun. So, let's take a 30-second time out to turn on Pandora radio (Chris Tolim I think will be the choice this morning, or maybe something of a Stand Up and Get Crunked variety).
On a whim, I tried the latter. I got the Ying Yank Twins, of course. Second choice was Stand Up, Fall Down, Get Crushed by the Impossibles, then Stand Up (Let's Get Murdered), by P.O.S.
I quickly decided on Chris Tomlin and My Deliverer drifted through the little speakers -- thankfully.
On to the topic at hand, a series of questions that followed a weekend of NFL football in which there were at least two with referees calls that all but decided games, games that affected the one and only New Orleans Saints, thus making them games with calls that mattered instead of those other umpteen games that had no meaning whatsoever.
Just saying.
Anyway, to the questions:
If a quarterback falls in a forest, does the entire NFL make a sound?
If a call in a football game is so close a rule book has to be found to distinguish good call from bad call, can we ever say it was an obvious call?
If a referee's call is that close, and it comes at the end of a game, can't we all still be friends?
And finally, most importantly, is it possible to be too Crunked to discuss referees' calls?
For my many non-NFL readers, as this is almost exclusively a column on religion and daily living (which I would argue includes the NFL, duh), two calls occurred that stopped the sun in the sky for brief periods this weekend. I know this because Monday is included in discussions about the weekend, thus the sun had to...oh, you get it, don't you?
Anyway, Saint Drew (and if you don't know who that is please gently close the blog and prepare for a long, long Wednesday without benefit of this column), was nearly clubbed to death by a dastardly arm muscle of a San Francisco 49ers pass rusher. Hit him a blow that would have felled many of the redwoods this 49er brute sees driving to work each day and drew a drizzle of blood from a lip devastate by said arm. A referee threw one of those yellow flags at the brute who did this and claimed he had roughed Saint Drew. His arm muscle should have been thrown out of the league.
Mouths have wagged since. Drew refitted his head to neck and drove the Saints to a tying field goal, then a winning one, making the plan vital to a team that made it to the Super Bowl because Saints Payton was erroneously driven from the league for a year for allowing his team's arm muscle hits on opposing players or something like that.
The discussion has been since whether the offending brute hit Saint Drew in the neck area and after the guy who works for Fox Sports in the greatest job in the world found his rule book and quoted at length for 30 seconds or so it intensified. The guy who sits there waiting for another "awful" call to happen all weekend (which starts on Thursday and ends on Tuesday) said it was a good call. Much of the rest of the world including China's numerous 49ers fans, disagreed.
Saint Drew said he thought his head had been ripped off. It was discovered this would be a violation only if it was a quarterback whose head had been ripped away from said body. Headless linemen wouldn't matter, apparently, nor headless Broncos or Colts obviously. (A Sleepy Hollow reference).
I thought it was a penalty at the time. I think it is a penalty as I write this. But a dear friend Facebooked that it was a horrible call. Another one told us all about how much he liked Saint Drew, but how this wasn't a penalty. Both are former sports writers and have watched as many of these "games" as have I. The fact we disagree shows the degree of difficulty in refereeing in today's NFL.
My opinion is despite the fact he was hit so hard my neck aches, what matters is the rule, whether it is a dumb rule or not. Everyone has agreed to this rule book. Everyone should go by this rule book, whether one likes or agrees with the rule book.
Anyone who looks at either the sill photo or the video and thinks the arm of the brute doesn't rise up and do its best to remove the offending head from the offending body of the offending Saint Drew is either blind or, er, blind. Perhaps one too many blows to the head of the watching judge. Not that I would ever get emotional over such a thing.
Bottom line is this: Rules are often the most difficult of things to follow, not unlike multiple cars in a traffic jam are.
(And giving this a religious overtone) To say that the Bible is just a bunch of rules is to give far to great importance than they should have. The Bible, all of Christianity, is about the grace of God, the love of God, not the rules of God.
Rules have nothing to do with Christianity. The Apostle Paul said that no one could follow all the law of Moses, and if one didn't do one of the rules (or laws), one didn't do all of them and was condemned. Anyone who thinks they can do all the rules is fooling him or herself.
But we still have NFL rules, baseball's rule book, NBA rules, even Books of Discipline or their equivalent in various denominations. Rules is rules.
But that doesn't solve everything. Two persons can look right at something that is ruled by a rule and see two different things. In sports. In life.
Therefore, there must be someone who is the judge. A head judge. The one with the white hat. And when that someone rules, that's it. It must be. And there must be consequences. For the 49ers (and later in the weeked the New England Patriots), sometimes the violation of the rule causes great loss.
What is going on in the world is there are many who try to circumvent the rule or rules because, well, because they don't like the rule.
But rules are rules. If one doesn't like the rule, there are choices: leave the arena or work to get it changed.
Awful call. Horrible call. Right call.
Doesn't matter.
When the judge rules, it's the only call.
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