It’s easier to grow frustrated about the way things are managed when you’re losing, whether you have any control over it or not. One thing over which players decidedly have no control is the manner in which games are officiated. And no players, I believe, have a greater grievance against officiating in today’s NFL than pass rushers.
Somewhat surprisingly, it even boiled over for Pittsburgh Steelers star OLB T.J. Watt following Sunday’s loss to the Arizona Cardinals. While he tried to restrain himself, he still allowed that he feels “the NFL has something going against me”, because it’s the only way he could explain why he almost never draws holding calls.
It takes a lot to get Watt to complain about the officiating. After all, even with the number of times he gets held, he still manages to produce, which is the most remarkable component. He has 14 sacks this year, second most in the league with another great shot at leading the NFL in that statistic once again.
But it’s hard to watch, perhaps especially because there’s little you can do about it. Just ask his defensive coordinator, Teryl Austin, who compared the way officials allow teams to defend Watt to the special unspoken rules former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal had to play through in not drawing fouls anybody else would draw. But it’s not just Watt. It’s the way the game is officiated as a whole.
“It is [an epidemic]”, Austin told reporters yesterday via transcript provided by the team’s media department, “and you tack that together with those guys being so deep off the line of scrimmage to try to block edge rushers, and it does become a problem”.
He is referring to the tendency for offensive tackles to set in a recessed stance off the line of scrimmage, which should be an illegal formation penalty. But they are also allowed to false start before the ball is snapped as well, so what’s the difference, really?
And it’s easy to explain the league’s potential motivation for why the game tends to be officiated this way. Scoring is what primarily attracts fans. The pass rushers of today are better than the offensive linemen as a whole. If you want more exciting games that attract more people, you have to let the linemen do what they need to do to slow the great pass rushers down.
It’s also said that there is holding on every play, and you obviously can’t even get through a game if you’re flagging every infraction that actually occurs within 60 minutes of football. But for Watt to have only drawn three holding calls over the past three seasons is comical.
To his credit, while Austin was willing to indulge the one reporter’s question about the lack of holding calls becoming an epidemic, he did not sit and pout. He did not lament his predicament or the predicament of his players. He did not offer excuses. He offered resolve, to continue to find ways to navigate around the circumstances in which they must conduct their business, fair or otherwise.
