Sep 19 2008 3:48 pm
Ed Hochuli is the man! Blame the NFL, not him!
Ed Hochuli is under heavy fire from San Diego fans, the NFL, and armchair quarterbacks across the nation. Mr Hochuli, or Tricep Man as my friends and I like to call him, did something every referee and official has done in the history of sports… He made a mistake! He also did something else that puts him above a lot of the others in my book… He apologized for it. Does that change anything besides a little perspective? Nope, not really. The Chargers still lost on a bad call. But guess what, it’s going to happen again and again and again.
Why? Because referees and officials are human. They’re under extraordinary pressure on a gigantic grass field with 22 – 200lb+ crazed athletes with nothing on their minds but crushing their opponents. Amongst the chaos, they have to actually see minute details like whether a quarterback’s arm was moving in a certain direction when the ball popped out of his hand. If the player who hit the quarterback hit him in the right way or if it was roughing. Where the ball landed. Who has posession at the bottom of a 1000lb mess. All this while thousands of people watch gathered in a circle around them and millions watch from the dozen or so trained cameras on the ground and in the air.
So to all of the people giving him hell… I say, with all of the emphasis I can put behind it, “GET BENT!” You take your ass out there and do it. Let’s see you do better!
Who is to blame in all of this? Not Ed Hochuli, that’s for sure! It’s the NFL’s fault. He blew his whistle when the ball came loose because he thought it was an incomplete pass. A mistake caused by perspective or hell, maybe he just coughed while the whistle was in his mouth. Either way, he goofed. And now he’s screwed because according to rule, once his whistle blows, that’s it the ball is dead and nothing can change that. And to make matters worse, being inside the 2-minute mark leaves coaches with no ability to challenge the call. Even so I don’t think they can challenge it because the magical all-powerful whistle blew and you can’t do a damn thing once the whistle blows. On to the next play.
What’s to change in all of this? Should it be Ed Hochuli, or the way the game is ruled? The rules need to change, that’s what! Someone please tell me why in the hell he can’t push his mic button and say, “Dammit man, my bad! I screwed up there. That was a fumble and the Chargers recovered. Sorry!”
Mr Hochuli is by far my favorite official in the NFL. Is he perfect? Absolutely not. But show me one that is. They all make bad calls. All of our favorite teams have suffered because of them, regardless of the sport. And they will continue to screw up because they’re people and that’s what people do. We can’t change that. What we can change is the rules that prevent them from being able to right their wrongs.
FIGURE IT OUT OH WISE COMMISSION!