For those of you who have been living under a rock, the NFL’s officials have been locked out all season thanks to the owners wanting to save a nickel (they’re nickel is just worth more than the average person’s nickel), but now are making their triumphant return tonight.
Which means guys like Ed Hochuli (pictured) are here to make the “right calls” going forward (and for Hochuli he will intimidate players so there won’t be any more fights on the field, man was that getting annoying).
We all knew (and by that I mean Vikings fans) that the thing that would put this lockout to an end would be a disastrous call against [the Packers] a team [or possibly Cowboys] that would absolutely screw them over [the Packers have been use to getting calls to screw other teams over] and possibly cost them their playoff chances [man let's hope]. Was the call in the Packers-Seahawks game bad. Possibly. Did it hit M.D. Jennings first, almost certainly.
However! The NFL rules a catch as “completing the motion all the way through” or whatever. This means (to my understanding) that the ball cannot be caught while the player is in the air. Apparent by Calvin Johnson’s game winning TD two years ago that they claimed he didn’t complete when he set it on the ground. So, how is it that if Tate’s hand gets their a hair of a second later, that he isn’t simultaneously catching it? Also the B.S. about him removing one arm to get a better grip on it upsets me. Are you going to tell me that I can’t catch a ball one handed? Now, with all this being said, I do think the Packers got screwed on the play. I would have given it to M.D. Jennings because he looked to have it way more than Golden Tate. I’ll leave any crack pot conspiracies about the Packers getting calls out of this part of the argument.
Here’s the most frustrating part as a Vikings fan. The Packers bitch and moan about this, but I recall a great game in 2010 ruined by the Packers ability to catch the ball at the same time. http://www.packers.com/media-center/videos/NFL-GameDay-Packers-vs-Jets-Highlights/a9f116bc-fc0c-46fb-a55d-0b536903d62b. Fast forward to the 1:05 second mark. These two guys catch the ball at the same time, and the Packers player lands on top of them. Tie goes to the offense so this should be Jets ball, tackled when the two were down and making contact with one another. Why is this allowed to be an INT? To me Monday night’s call was just great karma coming back to bite them in their cheating behinds.
After last weeks 5 timeout fiasco in the Dome, the Vikings will also be glad to get the regular refs back, it’s just unfortunate that the NFL fans had to endure 3 real weeks of football with those joke refs. Welcome back real refs, we missed you.
