Dak Prescott, Refs, and Football
I had originally intended this to be part of The Week That Was, but it ran on a bit long because well… some of it upset me this past week. So here it is separate.
You may know that I am a football fan, in particular an NFL Football fan and San Francisco 49ers fan, so with the playoffs here I’ve been watching a good amount of football. The first week of the NFL playoffs wasn’t lacking in refereeing controversy, and I’ll address those in a moment but I want to take a few moments here to discuss two other things here.
Referees do by and large an outstanding job at the professional level. Oh there’s calls we complain about, or things we think they miss, but generally speaking there’s only a handful of those at most in any given game. Many times you don’t even see all the different things the referees are doing to make the game run perfectly, or how precisely they call where the ball is just on eyesight. Remember, they are generally making these calls not with super zoomed in, slow-motion footage, but live as the game is going. The salary, while good, is less than any of the players on the field (it’s estimated to be about 205k and counts as part time, without benefits).
So to the refs, you guys often do a great job, that goes generally unobserved and not celebrated. If you make any mistake, or if anyone zooms in a thing and sees something that wouldn’t be possible to be seen by the human eye, there’ll be pitchforks out everywhere.
In fact, sometimes the players will even take part of it. Which brings me to the second point. Dak Prescott.
I try not to judge celebrities too much based on what’s seen, and persona stuff because it is just that — a persona. But I admit, I am human and I do and prior to last week my impression of Dak was a mild positive — not fantastic but definitely not negative. That changed when after the wildcard game he spoke lamenting that fans threw beer bottles at the team. When told the fans were throwing at the refs instead, he said, and I quote, ““Credit to them then,” he said. “Credit to them.””.
That is just unacceptable to encourage that and beyond being a sore loser. You can apologize a couple days later on Twitter all you want, but no matter how “caught up in the emotions of a disappointing loss” you were, you cannot be using your pulpit to support violence against referees. Violence is rarely the answer, and definitely not in a case like this. I honestly can’t believe his next bit where he said, ““I hold the NFL Officials in the highest regard and have always respected their professionalism and the difficulty of their jobs.”’ because if he had the least bit of respect for them he’d never have spoken that way in the first place.
As for the 25k fine he got? It’s a joke. He got $75m this year as part of his new extension. And this is from a man that his teammates nominated for the ‘Walter Peyton Man of the Year’ Award.
Personally, I can’t imagine any amount of gathering money for practice squad players from all the team’s perdiems as the practice squad isn’t paid for playoff games will change my opinion on Dak. He’s going to end up on my personal don’t draft list in future years, because I don’t want to be cheering for him ever.
As for the officiating problems? I’ll tackle the two most controversial in short:
- The Raiders-Bengal game early whistle was egregious and gave the Bengals an easy touchdown that should have been ruled a replay and Walt Anderson’s statement that the whistle came post play was laughably false to anyone who watched the game. I will note that the Raiders QB didn’t support violence against refs.
- The Cowboys-49ers game ending situation. First of all some context here is that the Cowboys were the most penalized team in the league in 2021. They got a LOT of penalties, and this game was no exception. They also got in their own way at times, ruining a potential followup to a trick play because the wrong person stepped towards the field, allowing the 49ers to substitute and causing a Delay of Game.
- Lets take a closer look at the final play though. On it, Prescott takes the ball from shotgun, and runs up the field in a QB draw. The reason for this is attempting to get closer to the 49ers endzone, as they figure one play near the 20 is better than 2 shots from the 40. So Dak ran up, and slid, ending the play and began hurrying to get everyone to the line. Here is where Dak makes his mistake — he gives the ball to his centre to place, and place he does. Spotting your own ball is not allowed. Dak needed to hand it to the official, who would spot it and meet the requirement of an official touching the ball before a play. Dak messed up here (and his spot was several yards generous to his team too) and instead of being willing to admit it there took it out on the Refs. Time would run off as the Refs tried to get to the ball to spot it properly.
To answer here — no I don’t think this is my 49ers fandom interfering in this. If a 49ers player had said that I’d be calling for his head as well, and the 49ers made a lot of mistakes last week too — which is why the Cowboys were in the game after a very slow first half for them.
So let’s all ease up a bit on the refs — they have a hard, thankless job with a lot going on it. And often a lot of criticism is based on what we wish happens rather than what has happened. They aren’t super human, but they are pretty good at their jobs.
