I have been critical because the refs stink and it's fucking with the games and the results. It started last playoffs when the Chiefs were just handed every call against Cinncy.(including an extra play) And then against Philly the calls were dubious, at best.I'm not sure there's a guy on this board who is more critical of refs than you. I can't actually know how much you care. But you use all sort of pretty absolute adjectives. "Unacceptable," and stuff like that. So it seems to be important to you.
I'm also not sure there's a guy more active than you on game threads. It's not like I'm following you around, but I doubt you miss too many games. Probably up there with luckiest.
None of this is to say that you're wrong and that reffing can't get better, but I do think it is a small anecdote to prove my point that there's not much incentive to fix anything. They got a little queasy when a blown PI call fucked a championship, but they got through it. Officiating is bad, but engagement is very very high.
I'm not saying that the NFL and fans wouldn't prefer that it be better. I don't think they would deliberately fuck up officiating to generate buzz. (Though with these fuckers, I'm not 100 percent sure.) But they are fantastic at making chicken salad out of chicken shit, and they have done a great job at keeping officiating from being a problem that affects the bottom line, and in fact they have indeed found ways to turn officiating controversies into buzz. We're all talking about them and we're all still watching to see what they will fuck up next. And for every bad call, there's someone who is happy -- because they root for the other team, need a turnover for their fantasy wide receiver to have a chance, or took the under.
And, my main point got lost -- we live in a world where television definition is better than human perception. There may be things around that margins that could make it better, but by and large we are all going to need to learn to live with blown calls. Expanded replay may help, or it may make things worse, or it may be marginally better. Same with evaluation. Same with maybe clarifying rules to be more objective. But I think we've learned that sometimes you think you're taking two steps forward only to learn you took three steps back. We need to learn to live with bad calls, because they are going to keep happening. No matter what adjectives that we use for them. There's no magic in football to make it better. At least in baseball you know that robot umps would be better, but there's nothing that obvious in football. And my real point is this: We already have accepted that this is the way that is, if not consciously then subconsciously. It's not going to change unless there is some big technology breakthrough. Same with, by the way, concussions (just to take another example). It is what it is for the foreseeable future. Some of the hand-wringing is, unfortunately, theater.
Since then, I've been more focused on the calls and because of Google Sunday Ticket, I can see every game on Sundays. The reffing is abysmal. Maybe humans can't perceive things but it's worse than that. The refs mess up everything. They make calls that aren't there. They don't make calls that are obvious. They make a call on one play and then the same play happens and they don't call it. They call a guy out of bounds who never came close to the sideline. And then call a guy who was out in. Over and over.
This seems more like inconsistency and incompetence than an inability to perceive speed. The NFL needs to actually hire refs full time.