The officiating was garbage.
Man, there's nothing I try harder to avoid in this chosen, blessed profession than criticizing referees, umpires, replay crews and the like. Their jobs are impossibly difficult, perpetually thankless. They're only spotlighted when they stink it up.
But wow, the Steelers lost to the Patriots, 27-24, Sunday night at Heinz Field, and I can't even conceive of a column that isn't focused almost wholly on how badly this game was officiated, one that had wonderful potential -- befitting the NFL's top two teams -- had the men in stripes not been half as influential as they were.
The Jesse James mess at the end?
Yeah, separate matter. I'll get to that.
I'm talking about Tony Corrente and his crew, which donned the stripes on this day with the reputation as the most flag-happy in the league -- 16 penalties and 125 yards per game on average, miles above any other crew -- as well as one that, strikingly, sees the home team win only 45 percent of the time, 10 percent below the league average.
Add those two traits, in any sport anywhere, and those are the look-at-me types, the ones vain enough to think the citizens paid to watch them rather than the actual participants.
Add into it a league that for years has been lost for clues as to how to properly adjudicate its own game, one that mindlessly assigned its most notorious crew to its main event of the 2017 regular season, and it's enough to enrage.
One of the Steelers' veterans repeatedly, vocally, declined to be interviewed anytime a reporter approached and, at one point, barked out, "Go talk to Goodell!"
There was another word in there, too, and it wasn't Roger.
Another veteran, speaking without attribution to avoid the inevitable NFL fine, fumed, "It's un-(expletive)-believable that they have that much control of the (expletive) game."
No soap was needed to wash that mouth. The thought, in this context, was wholesome and righteous.
"It was a joke, just a joke," another veteran told me. "The league's got to do something about this."
I asked what specifically he meant, wondering if it was the James mess. And no, it wasn't.
"There's holding everywhere in this league, all over the place, both sides of the ball. And you've got an entire game where only one team gets penalized? How does that happen?"
This, not James, was the recurring theme.
To stress this again, James is a separate matter. Corrente and his crew called that a touchdown on the field. Replay officials in New York overturned it.
But there would be no overturning the calls Corrente's crew didn't make.
Stop what you're doing, and raise both of your arms as wide as you can. Believe it or not, that's not far from the distance New England was penalized over the course of 60 minutes of high-octane, higher-stakes football.
Two penalties. Four yards.
One was a false start early in the third quarter. The other was a black-and-white call for a wide receiver stepping out of bounds before returning to make a catch.
So it's really just one.
The Steelers, in stark contrast, were penalized six times for 63 yards: David DeCastro and Alejandro Villanueva each was flagged for holding, Villanueva had a false start, James committed offensive pass interference, Cam Heyward was offside, and Artie Burns committed defensive pass interference.
Those four offensive penalties led to two punts -- both of Villanueva's came on the same series -- and the two defensive penalties were part of New England drives that resulted in 10 points for the Patriots.
Actually, both of Villanueva's penalties came in the fourth quarter as the Steelers were moving toward adding to a 24-16 lead. And one of them was a phantom call that, appropriately, drew an especially snarly reaction from the franchise-record home crowd of 68,574 when it was shown on the big board.
This thing was riddled with violent swings all throughout, not just at the finish, and far too many were flag-generated. Or lack-of-flag-generated. And if you ask me -- I don't care who this ticks off -- this would have been a very, very different outcome with competent officiating.
Don't believe it?
Buckle up ...
That's New England tight end Jacob Hollister with the borderline chokehold on Sean Davis. It was a 1-yard run by Rex Burkhead for the Patriots' first touchdown. If a flag is thrown for holding, it's second-and-goal at the 11. If a personal foul is called, this likely ends up a field goal.
I asked Davis, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if he recalled being in a chokehold.
"Ha! I was there!" he exclaimed with a slight smile. "I don't know how you don't see that. I really don't. It's right there in the play."
That's New England guard Joe Thuney initially locking up Heyward, which is legal, then reaching around to grab Heyward's shoulder just as Heyward's about to challenge Tom Brady. That extra millisecond allows for a huge completion that sets up the Patriots' winning touchdown.
Heyward was demonstratively livid in the moment, raising both arms and spitting fire at the officials. But he was dramatically subdued afterward.
"Nothing you can do," Heyward would say. "We could have played better."
The New England defense held enough to draw more than zero flags, as well.
This one's hilarious.
That's New England corner Stephon Gilmore forcing Martavis Bryant to make a brilliant one-handed touchdown catch. And of course, the reason it was one-handed was ... well, you can see.
What you can't see up there is that no flag was thrown, so there's no reason to believe a penalty was forthcoming had Bryant not strutted his stuff like that.
Which is ...
"Crazy, man," Bryant told me. "Just crazy."
To their credit, the Steelers did not blame any of the above. Not principally, anyway. Nor should they. As Javon Hargrave told me, "There are plays we still could have made out there. I'm not going to talk about holding. We should have done more." They blamed themselves, whether it was for allowing Brady and Rob Gronkowski to chew them up on the Patriots' winning drive or for not finishing their own should-have-been winning drive at the end.
But they also didn't ignore the officiating's impact.
I asked Stephon Tuitt if he'd been held at any point in the game.
"Many times," he said without even being able to look out from under the towel draped over his head. "Many, many times."
I asked Bud Dupree if he'd been held, this after he might have had the game of his life in finally being freed to rush the passer and hounding Brady all through the second half.
"Well, they called holding on our offensive guys, but not on them," Dupree replied. "I don't know what that's all about."
I asked T.J. Watt if he'd been held, given that this was an exceedingly rare game in which he wasn't visible in an opponent's backfield.
"I guess not," he replied. "I mean, they didn't call anything, so I didn't get held, right?"
Ouch.
I followed up that syrup-thick sarcasm by asking how the Steelers dealt with it out on the field.
"You know, I felt like we had some good edge rushes, and I felt like we were getting there. But I guess they wanted to see how we'd do it with our hands tied."
There was a lot more. But what spoke the loudest was who didn't speak. Vince Williams and Mike Mitchell, the two most talkative men on the roster, declined to discuss the officiating when I approached. So did others, but those two, above all, risked draining their bank accounts if they'd go off, and it was evident both were poised to do precisely that.
Sure, some guys also barked about the James mess. I get that. It's emotional. It's the end of a game they were all sure they'd just won, and then it was washed away with the falling rain.
James told me he didn't think he'd get much sleep, that every minute detail of the catch-that-wasn't would weigh on him at least through the early part of the week.
"It sucks," he said. "This hurts."
But he didn't come close to blaming anyone for the play but himself, and I'm OK with that. I've read the rule, I've watched the replay a zillion times, and I can see where the application is made, even if I'm skeptical that the evidence was enough to overturn the call made on the field. Remember, that's where the burden of proof lies, not unlike a courtroom.
The bigger issue is that the NFL does a terrible job defining what is and isn't a catch, to the extreme that Corrente, when interviewed by a pool reporter -- another sign of a terrible official, by the way -- explained that James "didn't survive the ground."
The reporter rightly asked what the heck that meant.
"That's the terminology we used in officiating. You have to survive the ground, which means that you have to maintain control of the football."
It does? Who knew?
Davis might have offered the most balanced perspective, this after demonstrating for me anew that chokehold.
"We knew what was going on, and we knew it wasn't right," he said. "But we need to be better, to take it out of the officials' hands. We need to make more plays. I needed to make more plays myself. If that happens, all that other stuff, who's refereeing, why they're not calling anything on the other team ... that doesn't matter."
He paused and added, "We can beat those guys. We will beat those guys."
He meant the Patriots. I think.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
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