Buccaneers Topple Panthers in an absolutely hideous football match

The NFL needs to clean this shit. The Thursday night Panthers and Buccaneers match was already a sad epic, characterized by a punch-free amateur offensive led by a pair of deeply uninterested quarterbacks. Then the fourth quarter ended, and what might otherwise have been at least a tense finish in a one-score game turned into an extensive and brutally dry exploration of rules and the replay process, interrupted here and there by football games that had lost all sense of meaning in real time.

The game was a real chore. I would not dare to submit, reader, a detailed recap of everything that happened before the 2: 19 mark of the fourth quarter. There were a lot of field goals and safety, and Cam Newton was awful. The. The Panthers were on the ground with the ball, and Newton had just missed Curtis Samuel heading straight for the right. Except, no, the replays showed the Buccaneers cornerback Carlton Davis, in contact with Samuel in the middle of his career, while Newton throwing the ball. Panthers head coach Ron Rivera asked for an analysis of the repetition of interference. Joe Buck, Troy Aikman and Mike Pereira spent 15 minutes trying to formulate a consistent assessment of the chances of revision while Jerome Boger watched the broadcast on their monitor. Pereira ended up being persuaded to intervene in the passes; At the time of his pronouncement on this conclusion, Boger announced to the crowd that the non-appeal on the ground would be maintained. Of course, it took several extra minutes to explain the decision to a very upset Rivera. It's the time that none of us will ever come back. Already!

I would just like to say here that a reasonable interference review process would allow a coach to signal an arbitrator, to tell him: this defender hit my receiver in a way that is contrary to the rulesand trust the referee to watch the replay and make the appropriate call. The NFL process, because it's not reasonable, does not do it. On the contrary, it makes it possible to make the unlawful contact reviewable only according to the moment of the throw, which, of course, has nothing to do with the contact itself. Neither Samuel nor Davis had any idea whether the ball had been technically launched at the time of contact – Davis threw Samuel a forearm because he knew he had been beaten and he did so. in a way contrary to the rules. Only a body as stupid as the NFL could cause the referee to refer to something that happened within a hundred meters of that contact to determine whether he is allowed to call a penalty an illegal play .

The referees have not finished messing up this game. Two pieces later, Newton hit D.J. Moore on a road just to the front row. Moore was attacked in such a way that the ball had fallen to the waist and viewers were able to see that the game may have been reduced by a few inches before the first try, especially when the first official The scene spotted the balloon behind the yellow cover line shown on the show. But then another official entered and unilaterally advanced six to eight inches, giving the Panthers a first advantage.

Perhaps discouraged by the endless debacle of Rivera's challenge a few minutes later, maybe even a lifetime ?, Buccaneers head coach Bruce Arians decided not to throw the red flag. It is hard to call that a mistake, because at worst, the Panthers would have been two inches from a new set of setbacks in a situation of four, but as we would learn soon, the Carolina's offensive led by Norv Turner has real bad ideas on how to pick up a few crucial inches of turf.

Three pieces later, Newton found Samuel for a nine-yard gain on the right-hand line. It seems that Davis shot Samuel's mask while he was returning to the ball, and that's what was called on the ground. But no, the person responsible for the retransmission then asked for a review of the room, again to determine if the contact was a pass interference. And for the call to be correct, the distance and the clock must be configured correctly. More than five minutes of your life, lost forever, after nine meters in a match of the second week, Thursday night. Poor Boger could barely express the result of the exam, he was so tired and upset.

Three plays later, after some nasty inconsistencies, Newton struck Moore for eight meters to create a fourth and two goals out of three. The Bucs, who had to worry about having a clock after a potential touchdown of the Panthers, called a timeout. Then, with the Panthers above the ball, Arians shot a Joe Gibbs and called a second timeout, which, as a rule, is a timeout. This penalty moved the ball halfway to the goal and set up a fourth and inch. We finally arrived at the special Norv, the game that actually ended the match. The Panthers badly telegraphed Christian McCaffrey and sent him a long sweep of the left side, in a room where they only needed a few inches. You will not be surprised to learn that it did not work.

But even this game required a revision! The referees had to determine if McCaffrey had extended the ball over the first goal scorer before leaving the field! Pereira quickly pointed out that this would be the defining game of the game, and so of course you would like to do things well, who could possibly complain about having used several more valuable minutes of my real finished life to review this damn game in super slow motion, even though everyone watching it could see the game sucked and that McCaffrey did not do it.

The Bucs won with a victory of 20 to 14, the first of the Arian era. You would not think that nothing on television on Thursday night could be more obscure than the presidential debate, and maybe you're right. But this football match gave this sad spectacle a real race for his money, which should not be possible. The NFL can not play well quarterbacks, it can not better block the linemen and it can not prevent the defensive backs of Bucs from mugging the receivers while all I want is to lie down . The only thing he can control is his rules and their application. It just can not be what everyone had in mind.