By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
If you believe in the Roman Catholic concept of purgatory, then you must believe that New Orleans Saints fans are going to heaven, because they’ve done their time in purgatory.
I grew up a fan, first, of the Baltimore Colts (loved me some Johnny U.), then got behind the Kansas City Chiefs during the glory days of Hank Stram and Len Dawson.
But in 1979, after finishing college, I followed my family from the wind-swept plains of Kansas to Louisiana, and quickly adopted the Saints as my team. I think it all started with the first Saints’ game I saw at the Louisiana Superdome.
My brother and I had seats on the top row of the end zone in the nosebleed section for the season opener that year, which means we had a clear, unobstructed view of Russell Erxleben shot-putting the weakest “pass” you ever saw right into the chest of an onrushing Atlanta Falcon after the snap on a punt attempt sailed over the Erxleben’s head.
Said Atlanta Falcon – I have no recollection of that player’s name – quickly gobbled up the few yards to the end zone for a game-winning touchdown in overtime. It was the start of a purgatorian relationship that has lasted now 40 years.
I didn’t think about it at the time, but looking back, I have come to understand that one of the reasons I – and many of my fellow Saints fans – live and die with this team is because any team that can lose as spectacularly as the Saints deserves my undying love and devotion.
There have been all kinds of bizarre ways the Saints have lost football games over the years. Heck, they’ve won their share of goofy games. I’ve long said that, win or lose, the Saints are the most entertaining team in the National Football League.
I thought last year was bad, the Minneapolis Miracle and all that. But the truth is, I got over that pretty quickly. The Saints made a mistake in the secondary at the worst possible moment and paid for it. I can live with that.
But what we saw Sunday in the NFC Championship Game between the Saints and the Los Angeles Rams at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome will forever dwarf the many, many heartbreaks over the past 40 years. It’s going to take a while to get over this one.
And for the very first time in my life, I have considered the possibility that the outcome of a professional game was rigged.
The fact that three officials with a clear view could look at the play on Tommylee Lewis and not see at least one of the three fouls the Rams committed on the play invites the idea of a conspiracy to keep the Saints out of the Super Bowl – and send instead the team from Southern California, with the nation’s second-largest TV market, a market the NFL desperately wants to dominate.
Now, let’s back up for a second and be real. The Saints violated one of the cardinal rules of competition, call it Caldwell’s Law – something like Murphy’s Law – which states that a team or competitor should never get in a situation where the referees/umpires/judges can screw you. Because if they can, they will. Yeah, I just made it up. But it’s true.
New Orleans went field goal, field goal, touchdown with their first three possessions of the game against the Rams, leaving, presumably, eight points on the field. Then the Saints scored one touchdown in their next six possessions, amid some head-scratching play calls on the part of head coach Sean Payton.
With the door left ajar, the Rams, being a quality team, marched right in, came back and tied the game.
If you believe Rams’ fans, they should have had a first-and-goal for a chance at a go-ahead touchdown if the officials had called what looked in hindsight to be a face-mask grab of L.A. quarterback Jared Goff on the third-down play that forced the Rams to settle for a tying field goal.
Which, of course, leads to one very clear observation about Sunday’s game, which is that it was abysmally called on both sides.
This has been a problem for the NFL all season, the deteriorating quality of officiating in the premier American football league. Sunday, it bit the league right in the butt, and took out a big chunk of its credibility.
And, further, you can say that the Saints still had opportunities after the blown non-call against Lewis – which came after the decision to pass on first down inside the red zone, another curious play selection.
After regaining the lead, the Saints could have made a play on defense to prevent L.A. from getting into position for another tying field goal that sent it to overtime. They did not do so. There is also no sugar-coating the awful interception Drew Brees threw on the Saints’ possession in OT. And let’s give Rams’ kicker Greg Zuerlein his props. He absolutely crushed the game-winning kick from 57 yards out; it would have been good from 67 yards.
But, here’s the rub. Everything that happened after the 1:49 mark of the fourth quarter – everything that will happen over the next two weeks and in the Super Bowl – almost certainly does not occur if the officials do their job on the third-down pass to Lewis.
There was no question it was a foul on the defender. He knocked Lewis off the ball well before it got there, coming in helmet-first on a defenseless receiver. That’s three fouls on the same play, and none of them were called.
With a first-and-goal, and the Rams with only one time out, the Saints almost surely would have run a dive play on first down to set the ball where they wanted it, kneeled down on second and third down, run the clock all the way to about 0:03, trotted out Wil Lutz for a chip-shot field goal and won the game.
To put it succinctly, the Saints were robbed, and all of America knows it. Whether you are a Saints’ fan or not, it is an absolute truth that the Super Bowl – the NFL’s marquee event – has been tarnished and the league has lost a lot of credibility.
It’s really a shame, because it does a disservice to the Rams, and, to a lesser extent, the New England Patriots, who advanced to the Super Bowl from the AFC – and not without some officiating controversy of their own.
This should be a compelling Super Bowl: the young, upstart Rams, newly-returned to the scene of much of their history, against the aging, dynastic Patriots, making one more, possibly final, stand.
But all anyone has talked about for two solid days is how badly the league screwed the Saints.
I mean, the Rams didn’t need the help. They’ve been one of the best teams in the NFL all season and deserve their spot in the league’s championship game.
But even if they win – especially if they win – there is always going to be the knowledge that they got there by illegitimate means. And even if New England wins, there is going to be a hollowness to their victory, because they didn’t beat the team that should have been there but was not because of an officiating mistake.
More to that point, that mistake deprived America of a matchup for the ages between two of the greatest quarterbacks in history, Tom Brady against Brees, two old pros, both now in their 40s, going head-to-head in a championship setting. That would have been a tremendous story.
The bigger issue, though, is that there is always going to be a significant population of NFL fans who are convinced that Sunday’s NFC Championship was fixed. Personally, I really don’t think it was. I think it was just incompetent officials who called a poor game.
But the fact that I even entertained the real possibility of a fix and that a lot of people really do believe it was rigged for the Rams is a huge credibility problem for the NFL, and it’s not going to go away any time soon.
And, finally, the league must address the quality, or lack thereof, of its officiating. It is bad and getting worse. There are a lot of solutions being bandied about; the NFL needs to study some of them and figure out how to fix it. Now, not later.
Or else it is going to have more debacles like the one Sunday that cost the New Orleans Saints a chance to play in the Super Bowl.
