After watching Week 1 on my couch, with my hot new girlfriend, RedZone, I noticed that there seemed to be even more flags in the defensive secondary than there were last season…and I thought that last season was crazy.
After watching first-hand the debacle of today’s Giants vs. Cardinals game, I’m throwing my own flag at the NFL! We’re not complaining about penalties in which a DB is trying to decapitate a Wide Receiver. We’re talking about ticky-tack penalties which used to be known as regular defense.
This did not make the game better or safer.
In front of me for much of the game was stud cornerback Patrick Peterson. Poor Patrick was very frustrated today, with good reason. But Patrick and the Cardinals’ complaints were few and far between, compared to the Giants’ secondary, who was a day long victim of the trigger-happy, momentum killing officiating crew of John Parry.
Starting with the Cardinals first possession, the officiating crew was the MVP of the Cardinals’ offense, the 3rd down conversion kings.
@MikePereira(NFL rules guru) tweeted at 3pm, as the Giants were once again being thwarted by the zebras: “5 illegal contacts, 4 defensive holds, and 2 Defensive Pass Inferences(DPI’s) in ONE GAME”. As I was reading this tweet to NYGiantsRush Editor-in-Chief, Craig “Pablo” Santucci, the Giants committed a FIFTH defensive hold- on Mark Herzlich, who was so far from the supposedly assaulted receiver when the flag was thrown, that everyone in the stadium was confused.
The highlight of today’s officiation disaster was when the Zebras converted a key 3rd down for the Cards by calling TWO SEPARATE FLAGS for TWO SEPARATE PENALTIES on TWO SEPARATE DBs! Neither of which had any effect on the play.
This is not a blog of sour grapes. The Giants’ turnovers, Ted Ginn’s return…sabotaged any hope of victory today. But after the first two weeks of this season, I am convinced that there is no more difficult job on the planet than an NFL defensive back, and if this continues the NFL will lose fans, because it flat-out stinks.
Andy Pritikin
NYGiantsRush Featured Columnist
@libertylaker1