I have no use for All-Star games. All-Star teams are OK, whether you call them Dream Teams, Best of the Past 50 Years, whatever. They are collections of the crème de la crème.
Logic suggests that pitting those crèmes against each other in a contest would result in a crème class contest, but it doesn’t happen that way. Teams made up of All-Stars simply cannot be as well practiced or work as cohesively as a team that had spent months developing its identity.
Same holds true with officials and the National Football League is finally admitting as much.
The Associated Press says the league’s officiating department has proposed that regular season teams of officials will be kept together for playoff games. In the past, playoff officiating crews were made up of individuals who had scored highest at their positions during the regular season.
The AP says the change is intended to do away with the problems that occurred in several games during last December. The most often cited incident was the NFC wildcard game between the San Francisco 49’rs and the New York Giants.
The officials failed to make a call which would have given the giants another shot at a game winning field goal. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue took the nearly unheard of step of issuing criticism of the officiating in that game.
The problem seems to be that officiating crews are like any other team. They learn to work together. All-Star officiating teams don’t get that.
The proposal by the league’s officiating department has only to be approved by Tagliabue to become law.
The AP article claims that the NFL resisted the intact team concept for playoff games because most of them have some rookie or sophomore members. They could do no worse than the All-Star officiating amalgams.
Under the proposal announced this past week, rookies on a team otherwise chosen to work playoff games would be replaced by experienced zebras from other crews.
The connection of the following with sports is tenuous, but no one else in the area seems to be talking about it.
Attended the Joan Baez concert last Sunday at the Ritz Theater in Tiffin. I had looked forward to it for months. In my salad days she was one of my favorite performers.
The show was worth it. Ms. Baez performed for an hour and 45 minutes and the memories of those days when I knew everything came rushing back.
To those who were so petty as to walk out on the performance: What did you expect?
It’s Joan Baez, there’s a war on, and there is no way she would not
have spoken out against it. If she hadn’t, it would have been a disappointment.
Agree with her or not, if you don’t want to hear it, stay home and watch
the Oscars.