Steelers Big Win Overshadowed By NFL's Ongoing Identity Crisis

I feel confident in saying that I never have and likely never will be more upset after a 32-point Steelers victory than I was after the one on Sunday.

Don't get me wrong - I was thrilled the Steelers beat some Raider ass and showed ferocity that was wholly absent the week before in doing so. I could have done without additional offensive line injuries, but on the whole it was a very impressive effort. At least after the first quarter.

It's not that bad calls went against the Steelers that enraged me, per se, because bad calls happen all the time to every single team in the league. No, it's the type of calls and what they indicate about the direction of the NFL that pisses me off.

Of course, I can't mention the officials without some fuckwit commenter on KSK or elsewhere calling me a hypocrite because of the way I rant about Ravens fan conspiracy theorists who blame all their team's losses on the officiating. There's a very key and obvious difference to what I'm talking about and how Ravens fans claim the NFL is out to get them and doesn't want Baltimore to win. It's whiny bullshit to explain away losses.

And that difference is I don't think the NFL is out to "get" the Steelers. If they were, they're doing a piss-poor job of it, the 163 penalty yards on Sunday notwithstanding. The fines are one thing. James Harrison has been targeted by the media and the media dictates largely who gets fined and how much, sure, but that's more a function of circumstance than the fact it's James Harrison. Had the hits he gave Massaquoi and Cribbs happened last year, or any other year, it would have been dramatically different. It was the worst of all timing of him.

No, I think the Steelers are among the victims of a league that doesn't know how to solve its current PR crisis with head injuries and their after effects. The Steelers aren't the only victims, mind you. It's the entire league that suffers. Pittsburgh has just been the most visible case so far. Because they stand out with their style of aggressive defense.

And the NFL has made it clear that it wants defenses to be completely reactionary to what the offense is doing. To follow the NFL orthodoxy is to wait and let a play happen rather than attack. A receiver is not to be contacted until he's been allowed to make a catch and adjust. The quarterback can't be touched at any point after a throw has been made, even if it's a millisecond later and the momentum of the defender cannot be stopped. You might call those oversimplifications, but with the results of the past few weeks, it's difficult to draw alternate conclusions.

Let's take a look at the three egregious calls that bespeak the new NFL "emphasis":



The supposed helmet-to-helmet call here on Clark is by far the most troubling. At least one could say with the Woodley and Harrison roughing the passer penalties, as bad as they are, is that they are consistent with what the NFL has done of the last few years, which is protect the quarterback at all costs. The execution might be inane, but the spirit has been there for some time. The move to make receivers practically impossible to contact is relatively new and looks to be headed for just as an idiotic conclusion. Here we see Ryan Clark hitting a receiver IN THE BACK and being flagged for 15 yards. In fact, the new "emphasis" almost causes Clark to injure himself on the play.

The problem with penalizing any contact with the helmet by DBs is that you even make leading with the shoulder dangerous territory. You can make a perfectly legal tackle with the shoulder and still make contact with the helmet. It's something the NFL doesn't want to admit. The league is operating as though randomly throwing flags changes reality. That means a tackler is going to have to aim so low that you're see defenders nailed in the head with knees or jamming their necks. You basically trade receiver injuries for defensive back injuries. Or there's no contact at all and the sport changes irreparably.




The flags on Woodley and Harrison were dumb and wrong, but this is how referees are going to confront these types of hits going forward. They're under such pressure from the league to prevent injuries, even on legal contact, that penalties will get increasingly ticky tack. The only hope for those hoping to see the game maintain anything of its current (or past) form is the chance that the NFL is only going way overboard with its enforcement as a token show of empathy for player safety to make the ownership look better as it enters into CBA negotiations with the players union and tries to get a longer regular season schedule.

Fans want to heap all the blame on Roger Goodell. He's obviously part of the problem, but certainly not all of it. The commissioner has no authority without the consent of the owners as a collective. Getting rid of Goodell isn't going to give the NFL a sudden burst of clarity on what to do on the helmet hits issue. Furthermore, he's just not going anywhere. Well, at least for the time being. We'll see after this lockout happens.

Sunday was a great win for the Steelers but it was also a sad convergence of a bunch of worrisome trends that might plague the league for years to come. I love the Steelers but I also love the sport they play. The former won big on Sunday. The latter did not.