TMZSports.com
The football world is up in arms after two CRITICAL missed calls on the deciding play in Thursday night’s Ravens vs. Bengals game. So, how does the league fix it? We asked the former VP of Officiating for the NFL.
Dean Blandino joined Babcock on the TMZ Sports TV show on Friday (airs nightly on FS1) … where we talked about everything from the play in question (where there actual fouls), to punishment for the refs who missed calls, to improving officiating moving forward.
“[Officials] would [welcome expanded replay],” Blandino, now FOX Sports’ NFL and college football rules analyst, said of adding additional replay.
“When replay first came back in 1999, there was a little pushback because it’s like anything else. You’re doing a job and now you feel like you’ve got somebody over your shoulder. That is going to tell you, ‘No, you did this wrong. You did that wrong.’ But now the technology has advanced so far. And so you have these tools and these resources. Why not use them?”
Ultimately, Dean says the refs desperately want to make the right calls.
“I can tell you having spent so much time with officials and in the officiating world, nobody wants to get it right more than the officials. The officials don’t feel good. And I know everybody else, the players, the Bengals, obviously today, but the officials feel worse because they want to get it right.”
“So if there’s something, an opportunity for us to get it right and not be talking about officiating after the game, they’re going to welcome it.”
Unfortunately, there’s no going back to fix the blown calls on the failed two-point conversion, so the Bengals will have to live with the results.
And so will the refs … which begs the question, what happens to the crew from last night’s game?
“[Officials] get graded and evaluated on every call, every missed call. So I would imagine they would get downgrades. But I wouldn’t think there’d be anything above and beyond that.”
Blandino also believes it’d behoove the NFL to release a statement acknowledging
“I think sometimes you got to come out and own it and say, ‘hey, we messed this up.’ I think that lends itself to the credibility”
“[Fans] are still going to be upset, but at least, yeah, they admitted that they blew it and they’re going to work on correcting it.”