I will have to rewatch the play, if I can bring myself to it.
SF had two horrifically bad calls go against them vs. Arizona earlier this year. I guess Arizona is more of a darling than SF? It doesnt matter.
The Rams had under 20 yards of offense most of the second half. JJ also got away with a blatant PI that didnt get called in the second half. I am not defending the refs, just, the old speculation of this being an intentional thing always rings hallow with me, for reasons covered in previous threads.
Agree to disagree I suppose.
Ok, so they(the 49ers) had two lousy calls go against them in
one game. And they had a missed PI call in the second half of a game in which they were firmly in control at the time.
Week 1 - multiple Vikings scoring drives extended by dubious "roughing the passer" and "unnecessary roughness penalties". True, I don't think we would have won that game anyway, but those bad calls are still there and probably helped make the result look worse than it should have.
Week 2 - again, multiple scoring drives extended by dubious "roughing" penalties, and two painfully obvious false starts (both OT's) on a play that resulted in a TD. We won, but barely, and probably would have won comfortably without the bad calls.
Week 3 - Romo throws a bomb to Dez in which he gained time to do so from a hold so blatantly obvious the Helen fcking Keller could have seen it. Fisher counts 12 uncalled holding penalties against Dallas. Another drive is extended by a roughing call in which Sims arm basically grazed Romo's shoulder pad. Late in the game when we have a chance to force them into a 3rd and long, Sims makes a sack (you know, how good teams overcome these things?) ... and the refs throw a dubious flag for defensive holding. Crucial point in the game, they get a fresh set of downs that for all intents and purposes seals the victory for them.
Week 4 - Probably the best officiated game the Rams have been involved in, and most of the loss was us shooting ourselves in the foot. Philly didn't need much help after we fell behind 34-7. Still, their LT was moving early all day, I don't recall him ever getting flagged for it though.
Week 5 - We discussed this ad nauseum already, but I'll refresh: phantom PI takes us out of scoring range just before halftime, 9er's score on a play that should have come back from blatant holding and turns a potential 17-3 or 21-3 lead into a 14-10 lead while shifting momentum. Missed holding calls on both other 49er offensive TD's of the 2nd half.
That's a lot of evidence. I would like to be able to accept that it was merely incompetence, but incompetence would be random. What I have spelled out above is not random at all, it is a very strong trend. Four of five games played by the Rams have been marred by atrocious officiating that is heavily biased in one direction.
I would love to believe it's not intentional too, but again, there is no way you can chalk up that which is outlined above to mere randomness. It's simply too one-sided to be a mere statistical anomaly.
At the end of they day, I don't know why this is happening. I can only speculate on motives and reasons behind it. At best, it's a strong but unconscious bias, the second word there being key and something that the NFL should take affirmative steps to correct.
Is it more than unconscious bias? I don't know. I do know that I don't like grand conspiracy theories that have a lot of moving parts, in fact I tend to be very skeptical of those and even here I wouldn't say that's the case. But it doesn't have to rise to that to pass the mere threshold of whether this is more than just simple but unconscious bias.
Regardless, I'm not going to ignore the strong evidence that is staring me right in the face.