A Victory for the Evil Empire

[billroper]

Sadly, Kroenke and Goodell got the result that they wanted in the Super Bowl tonight.

Lot of penalties on that final Rams drive in the Red Zone...

(I honestly have no idea of how close the game had been called earlier, but it surely was interesting at that point.)

Comments

[madfilkentist]

This year, I broke my streak of several years of not knowing who was in the Super Bowl till after the game. That's what comes of reading too much news. I still don't know who won, even after reading your post. :)

[jennlk]

If they had called the rest of the game like that final drive it would have been a much different game. sigh.

I'm kinda surprised that they didn't let Joe Burrow win. He's a better QB than Stafford, and is also a good storyline. N.B.: I don't like Stafford as a QB. Yeah, he very rarely had anybody more than competent playing with him on the Lions, and it's hard to be a great QB when your blockers and receivers aren't at least good, but he's not the second coming of Kurt Warner, either. (His wife was very outspoken against the COVID lockdowns/mask mandates in MI -- called it a dictatorship, etc.)

Rough summary of officiating

[ng_moonmoth]

Pregame commentary was that this crew would probably not call very many penalties, the relevant clichés being "let the players decide the outcome" and "let the players play". And that was the way it turned out, most egregiously when the officials missed the Bengals' receiver grabbing himself a handful of face mask on his way to catching his touchdown pass on the first play of the second half. Postgame commentary was that the players, being who they are, had figured out that as long as the refs weren't calling much, they could get away with more -- and did. The crew decided late in the game that that had gone too far for them, and the late flurry of yellow resulted.