“This game is rigged!”

 Every sports fan has heard these words uttered by someone. They might even be the one to say it. The conspiracy theory that games are pre-determined has existed since the dawn of sports. Of course, that’s silly. The amount of coordination and cooperation needed would be insane. Still, I wouldn’t blame someone for thinking that. Sometimes it certainly feels that way, or at the very least maybe manipulated to get a certain result. That’s because of poor officiating, especially in the National Football League.

Yes, every sport has bad officiating. Yet no other sport has so few games like the NFL. If an umpire in Major League Baseball makes a bad call that leads to a team’s loss in June, it’s likely not going to matter when it comes to the playoffs. In the NFL, a loss can mean the difference between home field advantage or not even making the playoffs. And the calls are getting worse.

Pass interference, roughing the passer, and taunting are just three of these rules which are directly impacting games in major ways. Recently watching the Indianapolis Colts, they seem to have the pass interference as a play call. Numerous times during games their quarterback Carson Wentz will just throw a ball up for grabs and hope for a pass interference call, and usually it will work.

 After the 2018 NFC Championship game where a pass interference call wasn’t made that directly lead to the loss of the New Orleans Saints, the league decided to make the call reviewable going into the 2019 season. Now a coach could challenge if pass interference was or wasn’t made using one of their two challenges. Great, problem solved!

Not quite. No matter what the call was on the field, even if it was seemly plainly obvious, the call stood. It got to the point where it was a running joke that it would be a waste of a challenge to try and challenge a pass interference call. The experiment was a failure and the ability to challenge pass interference was removed following the season.

Roughing the passer is another rule where interpretation of the rule seems be unclear. To sum it up, roughing the passer is when a defender makes contact with the quarterback after he has thrown a forward pass. The defender cannot make contact the quarterback unless carried by momentum. That last part is up to interpretation though. The idea behind the rule is to protect quarterbacks from big hits and low hits. What happens though is that a defender will barely touch a quarterback and flags will fly. A classic example is the 2018 AFC Championship. At one point Kansas City Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones barely touched New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady after he threw a pass and roughing was called. That took the Patriots from 3^rd and seven to a fresh set of downs late in the 4^th quarter. The Patriots would go to win that game in overtime and go to the Super Bowl. Roughing the passer calls have yet to be addressed.

Finally, there is taunting. Before the 2021 season the NFL competition committee, filled with owners and coaches, wanted to make taunting a point of emphasis for the season. It was always a rule before but hadn’t really been called.

“That’s something we discuss every year in the competition committee,” New York Giants owner John Mara said. “We get kind of sick and tired of the taunting that does go on from time to time on the field. We tried to balance the sportsmanship with allowing the players to have fun and there’s always a fine line there, but none of us like to see that.”

It’s hard to imagine this being what they wanted. During a Monday Night Football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Chicago Bears, former Steelers and now Bears linebacker Cassius Marsh stared down the Steelers sideline after a big 3^rd down stop. As he backed up it appeared referee Tony Corrente hip-checked Marsh, then seconds later Corrente throw a flag for taunting. This gave the Steelers a 1^st down and allowed them to continue the drive, where they would end up scoring a field goal. They later would go on to win the game. After the game Marsh was asked about the incident in his post-game press conference.

"On my way to the sideline, I got hip-checked by the ref and it's pretty clear. If I were to do that to a ref or even touch a ref, we'd get kicked out of the game and possibly suspended and fined. I just think that that was incredibly inappropriate."

So not only is emotion in the NFL seemly frowned upon, but the refs seemly can use this call whenever they want. They can do whatever they want to players and get away with it. Or at least that’s how it looks like to the causal observer.

It gets worse when you consider the fact that NFL partnered with four gambling companies prior to the 2021 season. If a rule can be used at a referee’s judgement, well what better way to max out your bet than to impact a game with a call here or there? Maybe those shouting rigged are on to something?

When you have games filled with multiple flags flying, game changing calls being made or not made based on the whim of a referee, or referees missing those calls, combined with a emphasis on taking away the emotion of the game, it makes the sport not fun to watch.

Whether you believe the NFL is rigged or not, the officiating must get better. It’s 2021, instant replay is available. Yes, it may slow down the game a little, but it should be important to get these crucial calls correct. Start up leagues like the 2020 XFL have shown that it’s possible to have emotion in football and proper officiating. No, it wasn’t perfect, mistakes will happen, referees are only human after all. But if the NFL wants to expand the game of American Football to the world, it starts with the officiating. Otherwise, those calling the game rigged are only going to get louder and louder.

Salvador Perez's underrated and overlooked season

 

July 12^th 2021, Denver Colorado, the site of this year’s Home Run Derby. An event where the best power hitters in the Majors come together and compete to see who the best is of the best is. One name on that list seemed odd at the time, Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez. A catcher who at most had hit twenty-seven home runs in season, who for the past few seasons had dealt with injuries. He was matched up with New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, the defending Derby champion, and it didn’t look good for Perez. Alonso hit thirty-five during his round, and no one gave Perez a shot. ESPN, the network hosting the event, decided to interview Alonso about his performance in the middle of Perez’s round. Perez would not go down without a fight. While the broadcast focused in on Alonso and barely gave mention to the Royals catcher, Perez put on a show, mashing twenty-eight home runs. Yes, he would lose, but at the end of the competition his mark was the second best of the night, and Perez proved the doubters wrong. If anything sums up Salvador Perez’s season it’s this moment. Overlooked and underappreciated.

In the offseason the Royals awarded Salvador Perez a four-year contract extension worth 82 million dollars. The highest in Royals’ history. At the time many considered this an overpay for a catcher on the wrong side of thirty with multiple injury concerns. No one thought he could replicate his success from the shorted 2020 season. In truth he didn’t replicate it, he surpassed it. He broke the single season record for homeruns by a catcher with forty-eight, which was tied first in the majors and first in Royals history, and led the league in RBI’s with 121. You would think that these accomplishments would be praised and celebrated, but instead at the very least it’s ignored, if not disregarded entirely.

If you take a look at social media in response to Perez, you’ll get the follow criticisms of his game: He’s a bad pitch framer, he can’t get on base, he doesn’t walk, he swings at everything, he isn’t a full-time catcher, and more. While some of these criticisms of his game are valid, just think about what Perez accomplished.

Royals second baseman and utility man Whit Merrifield said it best after the season was over: “It’s hard to understand what catching 130 games in Kansas City — in the heat that we have and the weather that we get and the humidity that we have — what that does to someone’s body and to someone’s legs and what your legs mean to your swing.”

Catcher might be the hardest position in baseball. You have work with your pitchers, develop a gameplan, stay on your knees for hours, control the run game, and then you are expected to hit. Perez did that. Perez tied the record for the most games played in a season by a primary catcher. He played 161 games and caught 124 games. He also threw out 44% of attempted base stealers this season, the highest percentage of any catcher with at least 375 innings caught. To do that all and put up those hitting numbers is amazing. Not to mention doing in it playing in Kauffman Stadium, an incredibly friendly park for pitchers and not hitters. And while Jorge Soler broke the homerun record for the Royals in 2019, it’s a bit different here.

“People don’t do that, you just don’t do that,” Merrifield said. “Soler DHed for the most part when he was here, and I’m sure his legs were a lot fresher than Salvy’s. So it’s apples to oranges, and it’s just amazing to watch.”

So, the question becomes, does Perez deserve to win MVP? Well no. What Shohei Ohtani has done this season is unreal. He did something we haven’t seen since the days of Babe Ruth, and he did it at an elite level. Yet that’s not to discredit what Perez has done. The only primary catcher to lead the league in homeruns and RBIs is Johnny Bench, the same person Perez took the record from. That’s good company. If anything, it’s to point out just how hard the MVP is to win. All that any Royals fan asks is for Perez to get the rightful respect that he deserves and to be recognized as the best catcher in the game today.

At the end of the season, Perez failed to break the Royals homerun record and the Royals lost their final game two games to the Twins. Perez wasn’t sad though; he was his cheerful and optimistic self:

“I’m happy the way I finished the season. It was a lot of hard work, it’s enough, it’s good, I thank god for that, maybe to hit forty-nine would have been better(laughs)…and the thing is, we’re going to get better...”

You can see why Royals fans love him. He just loves the game and works hard to get better. He doesn’t let the critics get to him. So keep under appreciating him and doing interviews in the middle of his Derby appearances, because Perez is just going to keep working and proving you wrong. As Royals manager Mike Matheny said:

“Guys like Salvy are making up with intelligence and training more specifically, taking advantage of all of the scientific improvements that we’ve had — all of that combined makes sense to why he is now becoming the kind of hitter that he is,” Matheny added. “I don’t see that going anywhere anytime soon.”

Spagnuolo's the problem in KC

 

At the end of week 3, the Kansas City Chiefs are in a position they haven’t been in since 2015. Under .500 and looking up at their AFC West rivals. A tough loss, at home, to a division rival, there is a lot of blame that can go around. Most of the blame should be on the Chiefs defense and their defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo.

Looking back at Spagnuolo’s history shows a pattern that doesn’t bold well for the Chiefs. After coaching a Giant’s team to a historic Super Bowl win over the heavily favored Patriots, he was hired by the Rams to be their head coach and led them to an abysmal record and was fired. His stint with the Saints as their defensive coordinator didn’t fare any better and was fired after one year. His return to the Giants in 2015 was a mixed bag as they went from having the worst defense in the league to a top 10 unit, only to regress again and be fired shortly after.  

Of course, he would sign with the Chiefs in 2019 and fixed the league’s worst defense and helped bring a Superbowl to Kanas City. Yet the year after, the defense regressed again, and this year it looks even worse.

The problem with Spagnuolo’s defense is his scheme heavily relays on pass rushers to get to the Quarterback. His scheme relays on players being smart and knowing the playbook and tends to overlook talent and ability. This has resulted in subpar tackling, wide open players, an inability to stop to the run, and players like Daniel Sorenson and Ben Niemann getting playing time over young players like Juan Thornhill and Willie Gay.

An attempt to fix this problem was to move All-Pro Defensive Tackle Chris Jones to Defensive End a position he has never played before, and it has obviously failed. Jones looks lost out on the field. Yes, he had two sacks Week 1, but outside of that he has been getting run all over.

Chiefs LB Anthony Hitchens described himself as a leader on the defense and said this after the game:

“I am one of the leaders on this defense, so I will be the first one to say I messed up”

 When he was asked about the team’s performance and if the defense played better, he said this.

“It is okay to give up 40 but when you lose you’ve done no good. Points matter, but it really doesn’t”

Do you really want the leader of your defense saying this? It reeks of not caring about doing a good job. It says that the defense is okay with giving up points and yards as long as the offense bails them out of it. When you look on the field, you see it. They use their high-powered offense and star Quarterback as an excuse for their poor play instead of doing their job and stopping the opposing offense.

If the Chiefs are going to go back to the Super Bowl and turn this season around. It starts with Steve Spagnuolo being able to motivate this defense, using his players correctly, and giving the younger players a chance to play. If this doesn’t happen, the Chiefs may be in trouble, and history isn’t on their side.