From Billsinsider.com
Let me say one thing straight out: the Seattle Seahawks did not play well enough to win Super Bowl XL.
Seattle had four drive-killing dropped passes, failed to generate a real running game, and failed to stop Bill Cowher’s trick plays, even though they were more predictable than Jerome Bettis’ retirement after the game. The WR option pass by Antwan Randel-el to Hines Ward is a play the Steelers used against Cleveland this year–the Hawks should have seen it coming. The Seahawks didn’t do what they needed to do in order to win.
Then again, neither did the Steelers. They allowed the Seahawks to dominate time of possession, they didn’t seem to want to cover anyone the entire first quarter, lost the turnover battle, and Big Ben had one of his worst performances in his two-year career.
Unfortunately, with both teams playing like doo-doo, that left the refs to decide who would win the game.
And they did.
The way I see it, the zebras made several game-altering bad calls.
Bad Call #1: Darrell Jackson did not push off in the end zone. If you watch in slow-motion, the defender was already moving in the other direction when Jackson reverses his momentum and extends his arm. Receivers get away with this every Sunday in the NFL because most referees understand that it doesn’t truly affect the DB’s ability to cover. Look at David Givens and Troy Brown, or Terrell Owens and Randy Moss. Happens every day. Borderline call, and one that represented the official trying to inject himself into the game. Even former offensive line great Brian Baldinger called it, “absolutely horrendous.”
Bad Call #2: Etric Pruitt was called for “holding” during a 33-yard Seahawks punt return that would have given them the ball at the Pittsburgh 46 yard line. Watching the alleged foul, it was hard to see much behind minor hand-fighting between the two players, and this sure looks like another instance where the zebras wanted to influence the game, for whatever reasons.
Bad Call #3: Big Ben’s TD. This one is a little tougher to call, but from where I was sitting, the BALL never crossed the plane of the goal line until Big Ben was down. Granted, it was real-time speed when the called it, and not at all easy to do, but from the replays I saw, the ball never quite breaks the plane until Ben is down and extends his arm across. Borderline call, at the very best.
Bad Call #4: This is one of two disastrous calls by the officials in the game. Jerramy Stevens had FINALLY decided to catch the ball at the Steelers’ one-yard-line. It would have set up four tries from there to score a TD. But suddenly the officials were there, saying that tackle Sean Locklear had held a Pittsburgh defender. John Madden said it was bad and he’s a Hall of Famer. Baldinger said it was “terrible.” There was no holding on the play. At all. The officials just wanted to impact the game. And they did.
Bad Call #5: Hasselbeck throws an INT and the Pittsburgh defender is running it back. Hasselbeck dives at the DB’s legs, tackling him and a potential blocker at the same time, saving what could have been a TD, and pinning the Steelers in their end of the field. Instead, the officials claimed that he threw an illegal block below the waist and penalized him 15 yards. Even the commentators said the call was flat-out wrong.
Bad Call #6: Granting Ben Roethlisberger a time out despite the fact that the clock had run out more than a second before he called for it. What? I guess they’re living in a temporal vacuum, one second behind the rest of the world.
Yes, the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl. They failed to do enough to overcome the Steelers’ three TDs, and scored only ten points. The problem is, they had to beat more than just the Steelers. They had to beat the refs, too, and that is not something the league should want to see.
As Kevin Hench from Fox Sports points out, this kind of bad officiating went on throughout the playoffs. Bills fans have been screaming about it for years, since we’ve been on the receiving end of the Patriots getting the bad calls in their favor. The problem is that penalties are not reviewable. They should be. The refs make as many mistakes as the players, and there’s no reason a coach shouldn’t have an additional two challenges in his pocket specifically to challenge bad penalties. Putting officials on this unassailable pedestal, saying their calls are beyond reproach, is setting this up to happen again.