Here’s a request for the fans who watched the Bills-Seahawks Monday Night Football game: please tweet, or Facebook, or email, or use whatever is easiest for you, if you turned the game off at halftime and never turned back.
A lot of people took to Twitter to call the complete botching of the Bills’ field-goal situation, from beginning to end, their final straw. As much as I’d rather not make this about me … I turned it off. Enough was enough. It was one fiasco too many, and I clearly wasn’t alone.
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Maybe the TV ratings will reflect that. Maybe this has more to do with finally driving away viewers, even after every other game the last several years has produced a mistake this egregious, or worse, that sent the nation into a frenzy.
Somewhere, this is being broken down. Who was watching up until the officials mangled things beyond recognition, starting with Richard Sherman flattening kicker Dan Carpenter and not getting flagged for it, and the refs’ decisions going downhill from there, and for way too long.
Somebody is watching how many were watching — and how many stopped watching after all the shenanigans. How many fans threw their hands in the air and gave up? How many said, “Again? You’re never going to get it right? You guys are going to screw it up every week forever? Why am I wasting my time?”
Some, meanwhile, still think this is the Non-stick Football League, that it’s still draped in some kind of immunity cloak, that the ratings nosedive is some kind of speed bump or blip on the radar or leveling-off, or that griping about calls is just a time-honored tradition that pre-dated replay and social media.
Or, that fans are still suckers, the kind P.T. Barnum talked about.
You guys are all ridiculous. Bad calls are hurting ratings? We watch for the controversy. Is anyone turning this game off at half?
— Andrew Perloff (@andrewperloff) November 8, 2016
Perloff is a producer for Dan Patrick's national radio show, which now has lots more fodder for Tuesday's show, so that viewpoint is understandable. And, sure, lots of the hard-core fans stuck around, and they were just as cynical about how they look at stupid, preventable officiating mistakes the way some hockey fans look at brawls and some NASCAR fans look at crashes. For the WWE crowd, sure, this is drama, and they stayed tuned in to see what plot twist would come next.
But lots of fans said nope, no more, no mas.
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There has to be a tipping point, and who knows, this might have been it. At least for some. There’s going to be another lousy call soon anyway, maybe as soon as Thursday, since there’s another game coming, because there’s always another game coming.
Another chance for the officials to get something blatantly wrong, for Dean Blandino to be forced to comment or to act, for Mike Pereira or Gerry Austin to go on air or on Twitter to explain it, for the league to act (or not act). An aside: CBS firing Mike Carey from the booth was supposed to solve the problem, wasn't it? That's what needed solving, the way the atrocious officiating was being analyzed? That made this sport better, correct?
Now, of course, we get to see if the NFL will punish Bills players and coaches for publicly criticizing the calls and the people who make them. The way Josh Norman was last week, you'll recall. Because the integrity of those officials must always be defended, while the players and coaches have to suffer the consequences if they lose, the same way as if they lose a game for their own public failures.
The Bills might miss the playoffs, and Rex Ryan might lose his job, and the franchise’s future might swerve onto a different path — and everything counts, just like somebody’s missed tackle or block or catch or assignment does. They can’t be minimized.
Blown calls can’t be brushed off.
Neither can blown audiences, or ratings. That officiating debacle ran a lot of fans off. And a lot of them might never come back.