The Aftermath and Rubble of Week 3

It has got to be a realistic idea that the owners could vote to remove him following this season.

We are starting to enter extremely murky waters this NFL season. After two incredible primetime match-ups were ruined at the end by poor refereeing, this whole 2012 season is entering asterisk territory. Luckily, the madness of the week resulted from things other then refereeing, but when the national spotlight was shining brightest, the officials were melting like butter. All throughout Monday and Tuesday I tried to figure out which angle I was going to tackle for this blog entry. Eventually, I realized my only course of action was to tackle every single angle from the weekend.

Insane Upsets.

Any of the people who picked the Titans, Raiders, and Vikings in their pick em leagues had to either be drunk, or forced to make these picks at gunpoint. The Chiefs to a lesser degree shocked lots of people as well, but me and the majority of the people in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome took this loss with a bit of subdued resignation. As someone who does a pick-em blog, I had been disappointed with my picks thus far. Until I looked at the leaderboard and saw that I was in the 97th percentile. My records have been 8-8, 11-5, and 9-7, and I am one of the elite game pickers so far this season. The Titans allowed two touchdowns to tie the game in 18 seconds, AND STILL WON. And they won because Jim Schwartz couldn't communicate the correct play to his charges. I surmise that Oakland decided they had enough from the Steelers after Ryan Mundy attempted to murder Darius Heyward-Bey (he was only able to hospitalize them. The Raiders made a late charge to win on a Janikowski field goal. And the now arrived 49ers do what all big wig teams do against lesser opponents, they look past them. Speaking of the Vikings...

Christian Ponder shows he is not Blaine Gabbert.

Yes I know Blaine Gabbert won on Sunday, but his 80 yard game winning score accounted for over 50% of his total for the game, and he still did not have more yards than Maurice Jones-Drew. Christian Ponder on the other hand, has looked the most impressive out of last year's QB draft class. He was poised and unfazed by the vaunted 49er defense. He showed that he is made in the Big Ben mold in that he can escape the pocket when it collaspes, find a window, and get the ball to one of his receivers. Both TD passes to Kyle Rudolph were big time NFL throws that has to have Vikings fans salivating.

The Immutable law of 6-in/6-out.

You hear it leading up to every season. The Law of Playoff Turnover. Every year, there are 6 teams who make the playoffs that didn't make it the year before, leaving 6 teams that did make the playoffs out of the tournament. Lets look at our playoff participants from last year and see where they stand so far.

AFC- New England (1-2), Baltimore (2-1), Pittsburgh (1-2), Cincinnati (2-1), Houston (3-0), Denver (1-2)
NFC- New York (2-1), Green Bay (1-2), Detroit (1-2), New Orleans (0-3), Atlanta (3-0), San Francisco (2-1)

That's right, 6 of our teams are currently under .500 with almost a quarter of the season down. New England and Pittsburgh are surprises at this record, Green Bay should be 2-1 (but that's for another section of this article), and New Orleans is dead in the water. I'm not saying the 1-2's are finished, but the empirical data strongly points towards the law of 6-in/6-out surviving through 2012.

When will the outcry for Roger Goodell's head begin?

Seriously, I'll say it: Roger Goodell deserves to be fired. I held my tongue throughout the entire Bountygate because I am a diehard Saints fan, and I thought my bias was just boiling over. Now that two wonderful primetime games were ruined by officiating, I know can say with a clean conscious that Roger Goodell is the worst commissioner is sports. He does not care about the NFL at all, all he cares about is fueling his own God-Complex power trip. He wants everyone to know he is running the biggest show in town, when all he is doing is running the biggest show in town straight into the ground. He is worse than David Stern, who often likes to flaunt his own power and don't-give-a-fuck nature. He is worse than Bud Selig, who has been dead for 4 years. He is worse than Gary Bettman, who is on the verge of losing the second NHL season in 7 years. Seriously he is that bad. Only someone as pig headed as he can watch what the fake referees are doing to the game, and not immediately seek to get something done with the real zebras. Hey, speaking of the fake zebras...

Fake zebras ruin two of the best NFL primetime games in recent memory.   

The officiating was so poor in both primetime games this weekend that instead of the disgust most showed toward Bill Belichick for grabbing an official, I think he should have just punched him. In all seriousness, the officials were jobbing both teams to a degree where both coaches ganging up to jump the referees at the end of the game would not have surprised me at all. Going to a non primetime game, the New Orleans/Kansas City game featured FIVE call reversals. The game lasted over four and a half hours. In the Baltimore/New England contest, the officials were trying their hardest to give the game to New England with ticky-tack defensive penalties. It was so bad that Baltimore's defense was forced to go into a sort of Viking-beserker trance just to stop the New England and the referee offense. In Seattle, prior to the last drive, I was lauding the refs for getting the game finished in a timely manner. There had been numerous penalties, but most of them just and not negatively affecting the flow of the game. As soon as this thought crossed my mind, there was a flag on 5 consecutive plays, the fifth one being a pass interference called against Sam Shields for being yoked up by Sidney Rice. I won't even discuss the final play because it has already been beaten to death by the talking heads, and truth be told, the play still makes me feel dirty on the inside.

What does this leave us for next week?

More and more uncertainity. I honestly suggest boycotting the games for next week, maybe then the referee situation will be solved. But we aren't strong enough to do that, so we'll keep watching in hopes that the season rights itself before we have to put an asterisk on the whole year. Next week, I'll attempt to give you an accurate forecast for all the teams after the quarter pole of the season.