Except for the fact that Vermeil was head coach of the Rams at the Superbowl versus the Titans.
My favorite refrain among the whiners pertains to the holding call. It goes like this:
“But even John Madden said it was a bullshit call!!!”
Folks, you must be absolutely ignorant of football history. John Madden was the coach of the Oakland Raiders in the 70’s, one of the AFC’s most dominant teams of that era. Yet, he ended up going to only one Superbowl, and his team was repeatedly beaten in the playoffs and AFC title game. Who else was a dominant AFC team in the 70’s? The Steelers beat Madden in two AFC championship games, and in one playoff game famously known for the “Immaculate Reception” by Franco Harris that impossibly won the game for the Steelers in the last seconds.
During his tenure with one of the best teams in AFC history, he won one Superbowl and watched the Steelers win four. At his announcement for selection into the Hall of Fame, someone asked him about the Immaculate Reception. John Madden remains, um, shall we say unappreciative of the Steelers to this day. His opinion on whether a call should go for or against them is worth nothing.
In my opinion, not only was that holding call valid, the Seahawks were lucky they didn’t get more called on them. I have no idea how you could look at Locklear’s arm wrapped completely around Haggans’ (IIRC) arm and shoulder as Haggans is blowing by Locklear and on his way to the quarterback and cry about it not being holding. Perhaps if they hadn’t been doing stuff like that all night long, or perhaps if it wasn’t clear that Hasselbeck would have been on his ass instead of free to complete the pass, the ref would have kept the hankie in his pocket again.
Eh? I was talking about the second Rams trip to the Super Bowl when they played the Patriots.
Another thing many non-Steeler fans fail to mention is that the the Seahawks had two completed passes, got hit, fumbled that where whistled incomplete. The Seattle recievers clearly caught the ball, made a football move, then got hit and dropped it. But it is the game, no ref can call them all perfect.
A bootleg is when the quarterback fakes a handoff and immediately rolls out; the intention can be a pass or a run by the quarterback. A naked bootleg is when the offense goes one way and the quarterback rolls out in the opposite direction.
No, the NFL doesn’t have it’s rules available.
I am a Giants fan and so I wasn’t really rooting for either team.
I thought the officiating was bad but Seattle lost just as much from consistent Bad punting and dropped passes.
Jim
Worst.Super Bowl.Ever.
The officiating was not acceptable. Neither team seemed particularly impressive. Just weak all around.
Excellent point - it seemed that the refs wanted very quickly to make them unreviewable as well by whistling them dead before anyone could recover them.
Almost forgot about that. How many touchbacks did Seattle punt. Drop that ball inside the ten, not in the end zone.
As a Steeler fan I can agree with all of this except it wasn’t the worst, as the Steelers played in this one. But neither team played the game that got them there in the first place.
And that really is my biggest problem with the whole media issue now, they are saying if Seattle played better, they would of won. But if the Steelers played better well, its a loop. Both teams played bad, the team that got a few big plays won.
Nothing dominating about it, on either team.
Oh, right. I guess I was a little confused by this:
I was thinking, didn’t the Ravens play the Giants in 2000? Then I guessed he must’ve meant the 1999 Superbowl and…
…never mind.
As a hawks fan (who is upset about the officiating but not willing to complain), I just want to say that the three really big plays that the Steelers did pull off were damn impressive. If they had played like that all game I don’t know what the score would have been like but I probably would be even more upset right now.
Regarding Alexander, it’s always been the knock against him that he doesn’t show up for the big games, the playoffs. Yesterday was the ultimate opportunity for him to put that perception to rest, yet he again did nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to change the tempo of the game, nothing that made you say “wow.” He was there, he got his numbers, but I’m left today completely unable to remember a dang thing he did. He’s got a rep and unfortunately I’m afraid it’s well deserved.
I came back in to mention two, although Abbie just addressed one. A seattle receiver caught the ball, took two or three steps including a football move, was hit and coughed up the ball which slowly rolled for 20 yards with a Steeler closest to it before it was whistled a non-catch. It was a catch and Pittsburgh had plenty of time to recover. That’s a big non-call for Seattle.
On another, I think maybe an interception or possibly a return, a Seattle player on the leading edge of the pursuit pushed a Steeler in the back, a pretty obvious clip. No call was made, another non-call that went Seattle’s way.
I’m in complete agreement that most of the calls went the Steelers way, but I don’t think it was nearly as one-sided as some would have you believe.
That’s unfortunate. Unlike with MLB, the NFL rules are pretty complicated and change frequently, and games turn on how those rules are applied. The least they could do is put a PDF file of the rules on their website. (MLB’s rules are online in HTML.)
I agree with all that.
As a football fan (and as a sports fan in general) i accept that there are always going to be marginal or disputed or plain old bad calls. But i keep my fingers crossed that, over the course of a game, they will even out so that neither team gains a decisive advantage from the officials.
In this particular game, just about every marginal call went Pittsburgh’s way.
I’m not arguing it’s a conspiracy or that there was any bias among the officals. As far as i could tell, they did their best, as officials generally do. It’s just that, on this particular occasion, almost every close call happened to go in one direction. Just the luck of the draw.
And, as others have pointed out, the Seahaks did themselves no favors with some of their awful mistakes, both personal mistakes by the players and tactical mistakes by the coaching staff.
By this, do you mean there’s no copy on the website, or that there is literally no copy of the rules available for anyone who’s not directly involved with the NFL?
If the latter, that’s an absolute fucking disgrace.
Then its a disgrace from what I understand.
I’m not sure the Seahawks really had the proverbial ‘game that got them there’. They had an exceedingly weak regular-season schedule, and in the postseason, they beat teams (Redskins and Panthers) that you could beat by shutting down one or two key players (Steve Smith for the Panthers; Santana Moss and Clinton Portis for the Redskins). Before the Super Bowl, it was an open question as to whether they could contain a more diversified offense, which pretty much any of the AFC contenders would have thrown at them.
I’m definitely an NFC sort of guy, but this year, did it look like any of the NFC teams could have beaten the Steelers or the Broncos or the Pats or the Colts in the Super Bowl? Right now, the AFC is that much stronger than the NFC.
The rules are available. For $9.95.
And don’t forget that they change every year, so you gotta keep buying a fresh copy. Sheesh…what kinda sucker would do that.
Oh yeah…me.
That’s my understanding of the rule, too – and I think it was a horrible call. Because Hasselback didn’t roll through the blocker at the knees.
I just went back and watched the replay of it several times (I taped the game). The ball carrier was number #24. He had two blockers near him – #26 in front of him and # 23 behind him. The ball carrier was dodging from behind his blocker (#26), making a cut towards the sideline. Hasselback saw this and went low at an angle (towards the sideline) to make the tackle – he was angling in front of #26, but PAST him, to the side a bit. The ONLY contact between Hasselback and the blocker (#26) was the blocker putting his HANDS on Hasselback’s back (not really giving much of a push or anything – so I wouldn’t call it blocking in the back) as he dove past. In the replay (which I watched in slo motion), I saw NO contact between Hasselback’s body and the blocker’s lower body. (Just #26’s hands touching Hasselback on the back).
The first body contact Hasselback made was his shoulder with the ball carrier, not a big hit, because the ball carrier pulled up a little, but enough to knock him off balance and bring him down. The blocker that Hasselback was MORE likely to hit low was #23, who was BEHIND the ball carrier, and who leaped OVER the falling Hasselback (so again, there was NO contact between Hasselback and this blocker either). The first “contact” was #26’s hands touching Hasselback’s back. The second contact was Hasselback’s shoulder with the ball carrier, making the tackle.
Certainly that call wasn’t going to make the difference in the outcome of the game, but I have to agree that this particular call was a very bad one. And it was a very good tackle by Hasselback, avoiding the blocker and still taking down his man.