When every NFL fan around the country knows a referee’s name following a game, it’s usually for a terrible call they made that pretty much changed the outcome of a contest.
That is exactly what happened with Tony Corrente following the Bears’ Monday Night Football loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers. The visiting Bears were trying to mount a furious comeback in the 4th quarter when Corrente called a controversial taunting penalty on Cassius Marsh, while appearing to intentionally hip-check Marsh.
Current Pro Football Talk host and former quarterback Chris Simms wasn’t shocked by anything he saw by Corrente on the field.
“I’ve seen Tony Corrente get personal to people on the field before,” Simms said on Pro Football Talk. “I’ve experienced it, I’ve seen it. I don’t mean to go after the guy, but I’m going after the guy. I’ve seen it, I’ve witnessed it personally.
“I got hit late in a San Francisco game. I threw the ball, I’m taking like four steps and I’m looking up in the stands, then I get cracked in the earhole. And I get up and I’m like, ‘That was a late hit!’ And I might have said the ‘F’ word too. It was third down, so then I run off the field.
He then went on to tell a personal story involving him.
“Usually when you come back from commercial break and stoppage time, the referee kind of gives the quarterback a kind of warning, like ‘Hey, call your play I’m about to blow the whistle.’ He’s not doing anything to me. Now we’ve gone through three commercial breaks, a quarter break and he’s just blowing the whistle while we’re all just standing around waiting for things to go, and he’s just starting the clock. So finally I go, ‘Are you going to warn me before you start the clock again? Usually that’s protocol.’ And he just goes, ‘Are you going to apologize to what you said to me earlier?’
“I wanted to lose my crap, and after the game I wanted to call him out. If we won I probably would have. But he just showed me, he was going to get personal, he was going to take the game into his own hands there.”
Corrente said he wasn’t aware he had even made contact with Marsh.
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“That I’m not aware of at all, no,” Corrente said. “I didn’t judge that as anything that I dealt with.”
Corrente insisted he called a flag based purely on Marsh staring at the Steelers bench from the middle of the field.
“That (bump) had nothing to do with it,” Corrente said. “It was the taunting aspect.”
Simms said he’s skeptical of his story.
“I don’t buy any of it,” Simms said. “I don’t buy his answer. I’m calling him a liar, I don’t really care. I don’t buy it.”
