Programming note: There will be no TSB posts this weekend, but we will resume regular posting on Monday.

SEC officials did not have a good year in 2009. Ask any Arkansas fan.
Before you do so, make sure he's strapped to a table and there aren't
any children within a five mile radius, but go ahead and ask if you need
evidence here.
You probably don't, however, since you know that the SEC admitted
error from the crew that did the Arkansas-Florida game, suspended
them, retroactively announced that flags
in the Georgia-LSU game were ridiculous, failed to call Terrence
Cody for taking his helmet off after he blocked a potentially
game-winning Tennessee field goal, gave Florida a
phantom touchdown against Mississippi State, and did not give LSU an
obvious interception in their game against Alabama. In all of this,
SN's Matt Hayes provided the closest thing to a defense: "SEC
officials just bad, not crooked." A ringing endorsement, that.
The last two are the worst because both of them were reviewed and the
calls were still wrong. People sitting at home watched the replay twenty
times, saw it was an incorrect call twenty times, and were then told not
to trust their lying eyes. It was almost like the guy at home with high
definition was getting a better view of replay than the guy in the stadium at the booth. What
say you, national coordinator of football officials Dave Parry?
"Sometimes a guy at home with high definition was getting a
better view of replay than the guy in the stadium at the
booth."
Wha?
High-definition televisions are coming to instant replay this
football season in three or four conferences, including the SEC.
You mean to say that big time college football couldn't shell out for
HDTVs until it was definitively proven that attempting to rely on a
black and white RCA television from 1956 might not be the world's best
idea?
What other blindingly obvious revelations have you come to
recently, national coordinator of football officials Dave Parry?
Some conferences will do more training of replay officials this
off-season, Parry said. "We're finding people are less forgiving
for the replay official's errors than an on-field official. We're still
relatively new at this. We've tweaked it every year."
Argh argh argh argh argh. This is because they get to look at the
play twenty times and sometimes they do crazy things like arbitrarily
declare the pylon to be part of the field. This is because replay
officials are usually decrepit former officials who are evidently very
confused these days. There is a certain amount of tolerance people have
for difficult split-second decisions. That tolerance disappears when any
idiot with a 54-inch plasma screen can clearly see something is wrong but the
people in charge of things can't.
But, hey, they finally shelled out a few thousand dollars to keep the
brain hemorrhages down this year. So they've got that going for
them.
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