Super Bowl XL: Criminal Intent

The List: Most thankless jobs

# 5: Everyone likes to blame the zebras, but the NFL has brought a level of scrutiny to the refs that's almost ridiculous. Most knowledgeable football folks agree that the refs do a very good job, making the right calls most of the time. But they make mistakes. And when they do, they get it from players, coaches, broadcasters, the fans, and then, on Monday morning, from the league.

All this for a part-time job performed under the scrutiny of TV cameras from every angle, a job that (unlike baseball, for example) requires studying an ever-changing rulebook that makes the federal tax code look as simple as a "Curious George" board book

DawgBones expresses my feelings

Super Bowl XL is in the books and it was anything, but one for the ages. In fact what happened Sunday night in Detroit, Michigan bordered on criminal. The best team did not win, cheating their fans after 30 years of waiting. The team that did win, their fans now get to hear how their team was given a victory it did not deserve. So you see both teams were victimized and so too were their fans. What should not be lost in the crimes of the evening are the perpetrators of said crime, the officials.

We are not going to look at just one or two instances where the zebras made a mistake, we are going to look at all of them. Ironically and sadly every one of them went against the team that should have won the game, the Seattle Seahawks.

The rest of the story here, there and everywhere