In college football, SEC officials have been under fire across the country, but they are happy to see that the National Football League has taken the focus off them.
Long-time sportswriter Rick Gosselin reported a disturbing trend this week: “There’s a red flag for NFL officiating: through 17 weeks in 2020, there was never a weekend when 200 penalties were assessed. The high was 198 penalties in Week 2. This season, officials assessed 214 penalties in Week 1 and 221 more in Week 2. This trend needs to be reversed.”
He added: “There were 256 NFL games in 2020. Officials assessed at least 20 penalties in only two of those games. There have already been three 20-penalty games in the 32 games the NFL has played thus far in 2021.”
Based on a report from Mark Maske of The Washington Post, the NFL has no plans to make any adjustments on how it calls games. “The NFL has no immediate plans to have its competition committee intervene to modify enforcement of the rule, according to three people familiar with the situation,” Maske reported.
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The league believes the players will adjust to the new policy. There have been 11 taunting calls through two weeks of the 2021 season, including eight in Week 2, per Kevin Seifert of ESPN.
New York Giants owner John Mara, who is on the Competition Committee, discussed the reasoning last month:
“We get kind of sick and tired of the taunting that does go on from time to time on the field. We tried to balance the sportsmanship with allowing the players to have fun and there’s always a fine line there, but none of us like to see that. It’s just a question of whether you can have rules that can be enforced and without taking the fun out of the game too, but nobody wants to see a player taunting another player. I know, I certainly don’t. I think the rest of the members of the Competition Committee feel the same way, too.”
