Sunday, January 15, 2012

NFL: You Make the Call!

You know those Southwest Airlines commercials where they’ve got Southwest Airlines employees acting like NFL referees, throwing penalty flags at other airlines when they charge people for checked baggage, change fees, etc.? Well, after today’s Giants/Packers playoff game, where was seen what is perhaps the most blatantly wrong, corrupt, bass-ackwards, fraudulent referee call in the history of sports (the first quarter fumble/recovery that replay after replay confirmed, just to have the officials reverse it anyway), I think we, the NFL Football fans, should run a series of ads, where we recreate criminally bad blown calls made this season (perhaps the worst season of sports ever for stunningly bad referee calls!), and we show the fans throw penalty flags onto the field, stop the game, penalize the officials, remove them from the game, reverse the fraudulent call, and continue on with the game with a new set of officials. That would at least demonstrate our disgust with such incompetence and/or corruption, and communicate the message to the NFL that they had better clean up their act or risk losing outraged fans. Then, for the tag of these spots, we could show the referees who were removed from the game being released from the stadium after the end of the game, and they’re greeted by angry football fans, who pelt them with rotten vegetables on the way out to their cars. (To me, this ad campaign, criticizing the NFL referees’ awful track record of blown calls this year, is something the NFL needs to see, or else we’ll probably be exposed to more and yet more crappy, unfair, disreputable and incompetent officiating next season!)

Here is an example of the “Southwest makes the call” commercials (which are great ads and should win awards for their creators!):