Shit Don't Work?

By Nick McCann

I generally don’t like to make excuses for the teams I love. I like to think if nothing else, I am a realistic sports fan. After all, I don’t root for a baseball team in the AL East or a college football team in Ohio. But the Chargers game in Denver struck me as a classic case of officials being terrified to piss off a crowd.

If a sport is set on making the best effort possible to make sure calls are made correctly-like the NFL does, and has been a leader in, for decades- wouldn’t it be able to take a time out to fix whatever device needs to be fixed? I would understand that if you are the home team, and you want to review a call, and the equipment breaks down, it would be fair to be penalized by not getting to use that option. But when a visiting team comes into your house, and the shit just doesn’t work, there is something fundamentally wrong.

They got the ball in the red zone and scored almost immediately. The human errors at the end of the game were horrendous and even though the officials were nice enough to apologize right after the fact, the technical stuff was inexcusable; especially when it ended up ultimately changing the momentum of the game.

There are a dozen reasons why San Diego should have lost that game regardless of the unfavorable calls. If your loud mouth All Pro corner predicts he will make 15 interceptions before the season, and then gets lit up for all most 200 yards and 18 catches by the guy he is supposed to shut down, you should probably lose on principle for the same reasons you should lose if your All Pro steroid freak defensive end does a stupid dance after a 2 yard tackle for a loss.

After 1/8 of the season, the Chargers don’t even have a winning percentage and they are actually making the Padres look good. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I don’t want to blame it on some ref or bad luck; I just want shit to work.