I was reminiscing about the infamous Fifth Down fiasco the other day, and it got me to thinking: What are some other examples of eggregiously blown calls, or other fantastic errors in judgement, by officials in sports?
I’m not talking about plays that clearly showed, after five replays from five angles in slo-mo, that the call was blown. I’m talking about glaring errors that everyone in the stadium, except the officiating crew, can see plainly. Things such as, say, a called strike thrown behind the batter, or an incomplete pass called after the receiver has run for several yards.
The three in baseball that were very, very obvious that I can think of were
The 1996 Jeffrey Maier call, where Derek Jeter’s fly ball was interfered with and was called a home run. It was pretty apparent to anyone with eyesight what had happened.
The 1999 Chuck Knoblauch Phantom Tag call, where Knoblauch was credited with tagging out a baserunner he wasn’t within three feet of. It was a ghastly call; the announcers were thunderstruck.
The 1997 NMLCS game where Livan Hernandez struck out a passel of Braves in part because Eric Gregg’s strike zone was about eight feet wide. The final pitch of the game, a called strike three on Fred McGriff, had to be two feet outside, and what was disgraceful about it was that the MArlins by that point were deliberately throwing those pitches because they knew Gregg would call them strikes.
Now, those are the famous ones. Every now and then though a regular season game has a real stunner. LAst week I was watching the Blue Jays and Aaron Hill, of the Jays, hit a fly ball that had to be 30, 40 feet foul, and the third base umpire happily called it a home run. I mean, I’m a Blue Jays fan and I was saying to my wife “Wait a sec… he didn’t call that a home run, he couldn’t have. That ball was like fifty feet foul. Holy shit, he called it a home run. Is he insane?” It was a staggeringly bad call, but fortunately the umps converned and agreed to change it.
Probablt the worst, most glaringly obvious, and important blown call IK’ve ever seen, though, was the Brett Hull goal agaisnt Buffalo that ended in 1999 Stanley Cup final. All year long they had been disallowing goals if the offensive team had so much as a shoelace in the crease, and anytime a skate was even remotely close, they’d reviewthe play. Hull’s skate was at least a full twelve inches inside the crease and it was so obvious that pretty much every hockey fan in North America immediately said “Oh, shit, they’ll call that one back, of course.” They didn’t even review it.
That call was just unbelievably bizarre, as if they just decided at that moment to disregard a key rule. I’ve always wondered if the small market team had been the one to score that goal if the NHL office would have called it back… or if they shirked from reviewing it because they would be embarassed about calling back a goal when one team was celebrating winning the Cup. I don’t know why, but they didn’t and they never really came up with an explanation why - their rather muted explanation afterwards didn’t actually match the rule book or any precedent, and failed to explain why the goal wasn’t reviewed at all. It’s a terrible black mark on the NHL.
It didn’t affect the outcome, but in the 1969 Orange Bowl, Penn State was going for a two-point conversion against Kansas as time ran out to win it and came up short. The officials, however, called Kansas for having twelve men on the field; the play was replayed and Penn State scored to win the game. That particular call was correct, but later replays showed that Kansas had 12 men on the field for the four previous plays, including the one where Penn State scored the touchdown to bring them within 1. The umpire said afterwards he always counted the players before each play, but obviously he counted wrong four times in a row.
More infamous than the phantom offensive PI or half a dozen other calls from the Super Bowl where the Seahawks beat the Steelers? I had the Hawks for a quarter at 18-1 preseason to win the Super Bowl :mad:
I know it’s heartbreaking, and you probably couldn’t bring yourself to watch the game footage again, but you can’t push off a defender when you’re 2 feet away from an official. You’ll get called for it 100% of the time.
Or are you talking about the touchdown in the fourth quarter that got called back because of blatent holding by your offensive lineman?
Or maybe, just maybe, your Super Bowl loss could be attributed to the half a dozen or more dropped passes by your receivers? Or Mike Holmgren’s inability to run a hurry up offense at the end of the half or the end of the game?
Believe me, we TRIED to hand you the game for the majority of the first half, but apparently you guys didn’t want it.
These are penalties that can be called on every single play of the game. They’re judgment penalties. In this game, though, they ALL went against the Seahawks.
And this play is complete bullshit. Al Michaels admits it and the chief of officiating Mike Pereira even admits it . This is the penalty that gives the Steelers the field position to run the gadget play. No way they run the play from their own 40.
FWIW, though, I never saw the big deal with the Roffleburger TD though. Ninty-nine percent of the time they get it on 4th down anyway.
In the immensely entertaining “Seasons in Hell” by Mike Shropshire, he remembers an A’s-Rangers game in 1973 where umpire Frank Umont called a ball fiteen feet foul by Sal Bando a home run. Rangers manager Whitey Herzog was quoted as saying Umont claimed the ball went straight over the foul pole. How a ball hit over the foul pole can end up in the lower deck was not explained. *That’s * a bad call.
Here’s what it looks like to me: 1) #11 from the white team and the goalkeeper from the red team slide into each other; 2) The ref gives #11 a yellow card for some reason (perhaps he though he was being too aggressive?); 3) #11 argues the call and gets a red card; 4) The replay shows that it was the goalkeeper who was too aggressive.
Seems rather mundane and routine to me. Am I missing something?
I’ve always thought that refs really blew it in the Oakland Raiders’ Ken Stabler’s famous Holy Roller play against San Diego, where the touchdown should’ve been called an incomplete pass.
Oakland may have received Karmic payback in the truck rule playoff game , where the refs also got the call wrong. That was a fumble!
