If it’s any consolation to Packers’ fans, eventually every fan base in the NFL will be as angry with the league as you are this morning. As long as the rules of the league continue to be reactionary, capricious and arbitrary, every team will eventually lose a game because an official tried to enforce a rule that is almost impossible to comply with by a player at full speed–and cannot be discerned by an official at game speed. Packers’ fans should consider themselves lucky the Vikings don’t have an NFL-quality kicker or they would have taken an “L” instead of an ugly tie.
Of course, there is a delicious irony in that the Packers got burned by a decision involving the “Aaron Rodgers Rule”–in a game against the team that committed the original “infraction” that led to the institution of the rule. But that is the nature of instituting rules on a reactionary basis. If Aaron Rodgers gets up from last year’s hit by Vikings linebacker Anthony Barr without a broken collarbone, the NFL never considers making “landing with the full force of a defensive player’s weight on a ‘defenseless’ quarterback” a penalty–and yesterday’s interception by Jaire Alexander would stand, the Packers would be 2-0 and hold an early tie-breaker over the team that was expected to win the division (if they had a kicker that could make a field goal and a quarterback that didn’t have a history of coming up small in the clutch–but those are matters for another day.)
The Packers likely also would have won yesterday if Anthony Barr had knocked Jaimes Winston to the ground last year, or Nate Peterman or Ryan Fitzpatrick. Any of those guys getting hurt would not have generated the concern at NFL Headquarters that losing one of the “faces of the league”–Aaron Rodgers–did. Consider that it is also illegal to hit a quarterback at the knees–the so-called “Tom Brady Rule”–instituted in the off-season after that “face of the league” was lost for the season due to a knee injury on a low hit. Mike Daniels could have been flagged for that on the same drive as he hit Kirk Cousins at the knees on the touchdown pass to Adam Thielen. Just think if one of the two Packers DB’s that ran into each other instead of making a play on the ball had picked that one off and Daniels had been flagged for another roughing the passer penalty. They would have needed to call in those Navy helicopters that buzzed the stadium in the pre-season to airlift the officials to safety after the game.
So stew in your frustration today, Packers’ fans, and decide if you really want to continue to put up with a sport that continues to chip away at what made it a great game for decades–but now has completely sold out to fantasy league play and professional gambling with rules that continually punish what had been great defensive play for 98-years.
