Arizona had opportunities to put the game away and didn’t. The call didn’t end the game. It didn’t even result in a TD. Bad call or not, they gave up a two-score lead with five minutes to go. The refs didn’t make them go 3-and-out. The refs didn’t provide poor coverage and let Nicks walk into the endzone. The refs didn’t give up a sack on a 2nd-and-1. The refs didn’t make them fail to convert on 4th-and-2.
Be that as it may, and fully understanding that sports fandom is an irrational pass time by it’s very nature, blame should be placed where it belongs. It’s easy to blame the refs for blowing a call (which is debatable), but the Cardinals still had chances to win that game and didn’t so blame belongs nowhere but on themselves.
I’m not bagging on Arizona, so don’t take it that way. As a Redskins fan who lives smack dab in the middle of Giants country I have a special dark place in my heart for all things Giants and was rooting for the Cards all the way. I’m just pointing to basic facts. The controversial call certainly didn’t help AZ, but it wasn’t the nail in the coffin it’s made out to be.
It isn’t a strawman. It’s the point you’re making, that blame “belongs” to the players because they could have succeeded more and didn’t. That would apply just as well if they had scored a touchdown on every drive but one. There’s always more they could do because no team ever plays a perfect game, and that being the case, the ref can always blow an important call, and that will be real thing that affects the outcome of the game. It’s just a weird moralistic bootstrapping kind of position to take to say that isn’t true because perfect play would have rendered it moot. If the ref screws up, there’s no logical reason to pretend that it didn’t matter the same as if a player screwed up. What you’re calling a basic fact is really just a demand that everyone ignore the actual facts of the situation, which is that if the call had gone the other way, suddenly a different team “didn’t play well enough to win.”
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When a game is close, any random event going the wrong way can change the outcome of the game. This is why you don’t get to whine about these singular weird plays “losing” the game for you. If you only play well enough to be in a close game, you are inherently allowing chance to change the outcome. Sometimes chance is a bad call, or a bad play, or a great play, or a weird bounce.
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Nearly all important games are close ones, so what you’re saying is that almost no team ever really deserves to win and can never blame anybody or take any credit for what happens. Which is a reasonable enough point of view; I actually agree with it to some degree.
But when a quarterback throws an interception with a minute left in a three point game, people still point out “ah, shit, if you had just not thrown the fucking ball away,” don’t they? And isn’t that a thing that makes sense to say? Because he screwed up in a key moment, and that mattered. They’ll still say the defense shouldn’t have given up that touchdown in the third quarter, and the coach shouldn’t have blown that timeout or whatever; they just won’t say “and because of those screwups, the interception was literally meaningless!” So why do it with important officiating screwups?
It’s precisely a straw man. It’s exaggerating a portion of the argument to unrealistic proportions to refute it in its absurdity and resting that the entire argument has been dispelled.
The point I’m making is that the original argument, that the Cardinals lost solely because of the controversial call, is wrong.
Who said anything about a perfect play? All they had to do was properly cover Nicks. Failing that they could have gotten some first downs to run out the clock. Failing that they could have stopped the Giants from marching right back down the field. Failing that they could have scored on their final drive.
It wasn’t one play. It wasn’t one call. It was a team failure for the last ~5 minutes of the game.
The actual facts of the situation are that Arizona had multiple chances to close out the game regardless of the controversial call and didn’t. That is the essence of not playing well enough to win, especially when the whole scenario starts with the losing team leading by 10 points.
It’s not illogical, inappropriate or wrong to think that a team up by 10 points with 5 minutes to go who gets their hands on the ball twice should win the game.
Following that premise to it’s logical conclusion doesn’t mean that they should have been perfect or scored more points in a single game than any team in who knows how long, just that they should have made one play in their numerous chances to have put the game away.
If it helps you sleep at night blaming the refs, that’s just fine, but it’s going to be a long season full of bad reffing for Cards fans.
This is a fair point, if a player does poorly in a key moment, it does matter, and he should shoulder blame. Since the point of the game is to watch players perform, their performance is relevant.
I see odd referee calls as being random events. Like you tackle the WR, the ball comes loose and happens to go to another WR who has a free path to score. You can yell and scream at the ball for bouncing unfairly, or your DB for not forseeing a million to one bounce, or you can criticize the 5 previous plays your defense screwed up that kept the winning drive going.
I don’t really have anything to add to this specific discussion regarding the Giants/Cardinals game but I will take this opportunity to reiterate my objection to “unreviewable” plays. It’s total bullshit.
If they get the call wrong, they get the call wrong. What they are basically saying is that there’s a certain set of plays where the refs can be wrong, and a different set of plays in which they are absolutely infallible; there’s a specific set of calls where they are always right even if they are, in reality, completely and totally wrong, and there is no recourse whatsoever except for a lame “Oops. My bad!” from the league after the fact, if you even get that much.
If you’re going to allow for challenges and reviews, then everything should be on the table.
Not solely. The argument was that they would have won without the controversial call, which is something else. You can say whatever you like about the way the Cardinals played to get to that point, but it won’t make it any less true, if it’s true.
To be clear, I don’t care even a little bit about what happened in that game particularly. Maybe RNATB does, although I kind of doubt it. I’m not a Cardinals fan. I just hate that argument. And no, that wasn’t a strawman. It is literally always true that a team would have won handily if it did more. In every game that has ever been played, a team had opportunities and didn’t take advantage of them. If only taking half your chances is reason to hold the refs blameless, so is only taking 3/4, and so is only taking 9/10. If you don’t do everything right, you’re suggesting, the refs can’t cause you to lose. But you pick a sport and play against me in it, and let me also be the ref, and we’ll see how true that is.
[QUOTE=Cheesesteak]
I see odd referee calls as being random events. Like you tackle the WR, the ball comes loose and happens to go to another WR who has a free path to score. You can yell and scream at the ball for bouncing unfairly, or your DB for not forseeing a million to one bounce, or you can criticize the 5 previous plays your defense screwed up that kept the winning drive going.
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Sure. It’s a perfectly valid way to look at player performance if you’re concerned about player performance, and it is definitely the way to look at a game if you’re playing in it. It seems to me that from a fan’s perspective, though, since they’re declaring a winner at the end of the game, that all factors that change the odds are fair game. Maybe neither team really “earned” the win, but one of them is going to get it, so when it comes down to it, what’s the difference that makes blaming that on a blown coverage a more reasonable thing than blaming it on the bounce of a ball? And the referees are actual people, so they can be criticized on grounds that a ball bouncing randomly can’t be. Once we acknowledge how much of a crapshoot the whole thing is, I think it becomes much less easy to put the entire win/loss outcome on the player, is all. Some of it is out of their hands… and in the refs’.
I mean, pretend instead of a football game, it’s a race. Your team is running down that track like a motherfucker, and the other team is behind, but it’s close. Then they get to the finish line, your team in front, and the judge says the other team won. That’s an easy one because I actually defined a winner, but that’s bullshit, right? I don’t think it stops being bullshit when instead of changing the odds of winning from 100% to 0%, the decision changes them from 94% to 50% or whatever.
The argument was, “Yeah, but they wouldn’t have [lost] without the call.”
My argument isn’t that they would have won without the call because we’ll never really know how the game would have panned out, but that they had chances to and absolutely could and should have, and that the call itself wasn’t what did them in.
You’re misinterpreting my argument, as was the straw man about scoring 86 points. It’s isn’t about doing everything right, or even doing most things right. It isn’t about how the game was played up until that point. They had a ten point lead and multiple opportunities to close out the game and didn’t. Credit the Giants or fault the Cardinals, but either way it wasn’t due solely to the call.
And finally we reach the crux: that wasn’t the original argument.
[QUOTE=You]
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That would be “referees crapping the bed”, you mean.
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I didn’t watch the game, didn’t watch the highlights of the game and didn’t really pay any attention to any of the discussion about the game or the call, so I speak from a certain amount of ignorance about how brutal the call was or wasn’t… but with that said, what I do know is that Arizona was leading by ten with five minutes to go and lost. That takes more than one questionable call to do.
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Yes, it takes more than a questionable call, but it would not have happened if not for the questionable call.
No it’s not. Judgement calls are unreviewable because there isn’t a clear-cut objective truth to them; it’s solely up to the judgement of the official making the call. As such, there is no point in reviewing them because many people can see the same thing differently, and even the same person can see it differently, and then change his mind, and then change his mind back, etc… Reviewing plays like that does nothing but waste time, since the judement call after the fact is no more or less accurate than the one that was made in real time.
Forward progress being stopped is probably the best example of this effect.
It was not a blown call. Argue that the rule sucks, fine. But the enforcement of the rule was made consistently with how the rule is written.
This is going too far. Characterize it more as the Giants caught a lucky break thanks to a rule that may not have been fully thought out.
Also note that the “bad call!” argument isn’t arguing that the Cardinals were robbed of a good play. They did nothing on that play at all that was good. They did badly on that play, in fact. The “questionable call” simply erased a pointless act of stupidity on the part of the Giants that wasn’t even part of the play, so it’s not like the Cards made some great play that the refs took back.
It’s not like Megatron being robbed of his great catch because he didn’t hold onto the ball as he got up. (That was Megatron, right?) The Cards did nothing on that play, and now people whine because the game wasn’t handed to them on a rules-lawyery technicality? Hard to muster up much sympathy.
The call didn’t help their situation, certainly, but it wasn’t why they ended up losing. They lost because they could neither stop the Giants offense nor get their own offense going. Had they done either of those things, the call wouldn’t have mattered.
After watching the highlights and reading a couple of sources about the game, I’m prone to think that the call had very little to do with their eventual loss as even without it they seemed incapable of winning. Considering the Giants moved from their own 20 and scored a TD in 7 plays on the last drive before the call and that the very next play after it was a 29 yard completion, I find it hard to imagine that the game turned on that play; that the Cardinals would have somehow found a way to keep the Giants out of the endzone within the next couple of plays anyway.
I disagree. If anything should be reviewable, it’s the judgement calls. There are 7 officials on the field. The referee has final authority on all rulings. Perhaps he would apply a rule differently than the side judge who just called pass interference while the referee was looking the other way. Since “the judgement call after the fact is no more or less accurate than the one made in real time,” how about we get another set of eyes on it just in case the first guy made an egregious error?
I’m a head coach, and the league has given me 2 red flags which I can use to challenge a play. What’s the difference if I want to use one to make them be sure that my guy was really holding or maybe an offensive lineman did flinch and it should be a false start instead of offsides. I’ve still only got two challenges, if I want to burn one or both of them to review a ticky-tacky call, that’s my prerogative, it’s not for the league to tell me it’s impossible because on these specific plays the officials are completely infallible when it has been clear so many times that they most certainly are not.
This is absolutely true, but it doesn’t matter. If a quarterback makes a bonehead throw that hits a linebacker in the gut and gets picked off, it’s a pick, just as much as a great diving catch by a corner on a perfectly thrown pass.
Same thing applies to fumbles; Cruz made a bonehead play, forgetting to take the ball to the official when he gave himself up. The Cardinals’ secondary was sufficiently aware to recover it before the play was blown dead.
The Cardinals had to get a stop on one of the last two drives to win the game. They got a stop on the last drive, and it was taken away by the officials. They could have stopped the Giants on the previous drive instead, but they didn’t. That doesn’t mean they didn’t do enough to win the game by stopping them on the drive in which the call occurred.
By your logic, a team that loses because of a bad call can never be upset about the call, because hey, they should have won anyway. As I pointed out above, most NFL games come down to one play, so saying a team should make some other play just doesn’t make sense.
Would have been difficult for the Giants to score without the ball, you know.