The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Yesterday was NFL Championship Sunday, which means today we are left talking about the officiating. Well, the officiating and the injuries. This is simply how it goes in the modern NFL. The season is too long. The games are too chaotic. The 49ers ran out of quarterbacks. The Chiefs ran out of players to run pass patterns. Everybody, and I mean everybody, was limping. And the officials, unwillingly I suspect, helped decide who would go to the Super Bowl. It happens every year.

There are two official decisions from Sunday that I want to discuss here, not because they were right or wrong but because they get at the heart of what right and wrong even mean in today’s NFL.

The first call comes from the Eagles-49ers game, a 31-7 blowout that was decided on the 49ers’ first drive when quarterback Brock Purdy was hit hard and apparently lost feeling in his right hand. Without Purdy, San Francisco had almost no chance, and then when their next quarterback, Josh Johnson, cracked his head against the turf, they had no chance at all.