In Defense Of Roger Goodell And The NFL’s Replacement Referees

“Derp de derp I don’t know what pants are.”

~NFL Replacement Referees

America is founded on the tradition of people getting to be on TV for being worse at life than everyone.  It is with that intrepid spirit that the National Football League decided that their current crop of referees were doing too much “officiating” and “ensuring that games don’t break down into melees involving dozens of giant men” for their liking, and they hired the various descendants of Mr. Magoo to help fill in.  While the NFL is still negotiating vigorously to reach a compromise on a reasonable price, they’ve still been unable to procure the rights to Yakety Sax so we’ve not yet gotten to see the replacement referees the way Roger Goodell intended.

But as an organization that has made a name for themselves through their tireless commitment to the art of going to work drunk, we here at AFFotD are here to offer our full support to these trailblazers of ineptitude.  Because no matter how bad they are at their jobs, Blockbuster managers had to go somewhere after they drove their business into the ground, right?  And no matter how culpable Roger Goodell might appear in all of this, if America was founded on the belief that evil, egotistical, megalomaniacal men shouldn’t hold positions of power, there’d be a lot fewer Chinese corpses buried along our railroad lines.  And with that, we offer you…

In Defense Of Roger Goodell And The NFL’s Replacement Referees

Now, we tend not to go “topical” too often, because usually by the time the news comes on at night we’ve already downed a half a fifth of whiskey and are sending incoherent text messages to our ex-spouses while sending facebook friend requests to random girls that we thought were cute when we were in high school with them.  But after this Monday’s blown call that directly lead to a Green Bay Packers loss, a lot of vitriol has been tossed at both NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the scabs consummate professionals filling in for the striking referees.  And frankly, we think it is grossly unfair.  If America can unite for two glorious weeks in 2011 behind Charlie Sheen’s cocaine ramblings, we should be able to find the entertainment value in grown men dressed in striped shirts apparently thinking that a billion dollar sports industry should operate under Opposite Day rules.

The replacement referees aren’t doing anything but making NFL games more exciting by upping the level of difficulty.  We all love playing Ping-Pong, but we love it even more when the room has a low ceiling and pillars and any surface is considered fair game.   You could smash the ball as hard as you can straight into a wall and somehow manage to have it bounce in through pure luck and give you that point.  That’s exactly what the Seattle Seahawks and Baltimore Ravens did this past week.  Should they have won?  Well, no, but so what?  If a team that is supposed to lose an NFL game ends up winning through sheer incompetence, who does that actually hurt other than the players, the coaches, their staff, the fans of the winning and unfairly losing team, gamblers in Vegas, people in office pick ‘em leagues, people with Aaron Rodgers on their fantasy football team, people who foolishly believe in the sanctity of the sport, and unbaptized babies?  See?  It’s a victimless crime!

As for Roger Goodell still insisting we rely on the replacement refs, he’s simply a businessman who is trying to make sure an entire workforce doesn’t get the payment they deserve.  If you have a problem with that as an American, it must be pretty hard to walk around places without any sneakers.  After all, if you ran a business, would you rather the news talk about how you’re slowly killing your employees, or that your product is enjoyable but the latest batch was really irritatingly flawed?

So America, embrace the replacement referees as the goofy, confused albatrosses that they are.  They’re trying their best, and in a way, that sort of makes it even more hilarious.

Unless they fuck over the team you’re rooting for, in which case fuck those bastards to hell.