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26 Responses to “Can You Count The Holds?”

1. jeremy says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

   Crybaby Steeler Fan

2. Mike Boyko says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 1:51 pm

   Sticks and stones, but can you see a Mahan hold on that 2-point conversion try?

   I don’t think so. Don’t be shocked if the league apologizes to the Steelers later this week for the mucked up calls.

3. Khaine says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 2:02 pm

   Wait just a minute… you are complaining about officiating when Ward nearly rips the facemask off of someone - no flag, then Davenport is short of the goal line and he gets the Rothlessburger close enough call for a touchdown?!?!

   You have got to be kidding me.

4. Dave B says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 2:26 pm

   I saw those holds in the game Mike. Unfortunately, the Steelers left themselves in a position to let the officials determine the outcome of the game.

5. Mike Frazer says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 2:33 pm

   Let’s not forget that Barnes held on at least 2 of every 3 downs. On MJD’s 11-yard TD run, he drags Larry Foot to the ground by the jersey on the outside of his shoulder pad. Which gap did he run through to score? Yup, right where Foote SHOULD have been.

   Yeah, Ward did grab a facemask. It should have been, at worst, offsetting penalties because the pass interference occurred before the facemask, not as a result of it. But if you think one non-call in the Steelers’ favor makes up for nearly 60 minutes of shady line play by the Jags, you’re sadly mistaken. That said, the Steelers put themselves in a position where it came down to bad calls by the officials deciding the game. I didn’t see a zebra throwing three INTs. So the team is certainly not blameless in the loss.

6. Mike Boyko says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 2:43 pm

   Oh I am not soley blaming the refs for the loss. The Steelers played like shit and need to improve and will benefit in the draft positioning more from losing.

   All I’m saying is refs shouldn’t continually play this big of an impact on games.

   Look at the SD game. It is 9-6 Titans, Hanesworth jumps offsides and bowls over Rivers. Rivers cries to the refs about unnessessary roughness, then SD scores on the next play from the free 15 yards. Any other time they never throw that flag, and before that break SD couldn’t do anything offensively. Don’t tell me the refs don’t dictate the outcome, when everyone knows they shouldn’t.

7. Andrew Neilson says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 4:27 pm

   Yeah, you really can’t blame the officials for making the calls they did. Bottom line is that the special teams killed us … again. Surprise, surprise. I’m also positive the league will apologize to the Steelers … but they’ll also apologize for Jacksonville for some of the bad calls that went against them, too.

   The team is the focus, not the officials. And the team didn’t get the job done. I’m just as upset about the outcome as the rest of Steeler nation, but lets be honest and not make excuses.

   Things will change and August is just around the corner. We’ll see what happens in 2008. Instead, I find myself more concerned with finding a true center to bring back that umph that was there when Weber, Dawson and Hartings played the position. It’s blatantly obvious to me that Mr. Mahan is better suited as a tackle or guard after watching him play pretty terribly there all year long.

8. Dave B says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 5:12 pm

   I saw someone being held (#97 i believe) by 2 guys on the Kickoff Return and as a result, Jones-Drew ran right by him.

9. Andrew Farrar says:
   

   January 7th, 2008 at 5:34 pm

   Well, not being as up to speed on the rules as everyone else here, I sort of rely on the commentators and they didn’t mention any of these phantom (for lack of a better word) penalties that everyone’s going on about.
   Maybe the officials are getting worse, but I still think it’s better than when I first started watching and almost every play was watched over and over to make sure the right decision was made. That was just tedious.
   Coaches make mistakes, players make mistakes and, naturally enough, officials make mistakes - that’s just the way it is.
   Maybe poor officiating didn’t help the Steelers, but nor did the manifest mistakes of Pittsburgh’s playing and coaching staff.

10. Original TMac says:
    

    January 7th, 2008 at 6:59 pm

    Seriously, still? When did we become Seahawks fans?

    Call a pass on 3rd and 6 and don’t put the game in the hands of special teams.

    Tackle Jones-Drew or cover him on 3rd down.

    Don’t throw three interceptions.

    Don’t go for two from 12 yards away.

    Do almost any one of those things and the Steelers are playing the Patriots this week. I guess it makes some people feel better to blame the refs instead of bad plays/play calls.

11. Boots says:
    

    January 7th, 2008 at 7:01 pm

    You have just lowered yourself to the same level as the fans of Oakland and Seattle, to name a few.

    Had the team played a better game, officiation would not have had a need to be questioned.

    Take your losses like a true Steeler fan and wear them proudly along side of those 5 rings.

12. Ed says:
    

    January 7th, 2008 at 9:30 pm

    I agree with Original TMac.

13. Mike Boyko says:
    

    January 7th, 2008 at 10:30 pm

    Apparently I wasn’t the only one that felt the refs had a hand in Saturday’s outcome. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08007/847253-66.stm

14. Mike Boyko says:
    

    January 7th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

    TMac,

    I see your point about becoming Seattle fans, but to become Seattle fans you have to complain about calls two years later.

    I am not saying the Steelers didn’t play like shit. I am not saying the playcalling and the execution didn’t suck. Why the hell run a qb sweep left on 3rd and 6, when you didn’t run that all season? Why not spread the Jags out and run a draw with Verron Haynes? He would have gotten the yardage.

    All I’m saying is the refs had a hand in the outcome and the game suffered because of it.

    It doesn’t make me feel better to blame the refs and not the team. Trust me that team couldn’t have been any more under prepared. At half time me and my buddy were talking about how much the subtraction of Joey Porter and Bill Cowher was effecting this team. Did you ever see Bill Cowher team come out flat and looking unprepared? Did you ever see a defense with Joey Porter not play with a chip on their shoulders?

    There are so many areas for improvement, but the refs time and again effect the outcomes of playoff games, when they shouldn’t. It’s rediculous.

15. Mike Frazer says:
    

    January 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    TMac, like I said the team put themselves into a position where it came down to a few bad calls. Giving up a 96-yard kickoff return, throwing three INTs, letting one get returned for a TD, and failing to cover a runner in the flat on 3rd down (that is about as basic as defensive fundamentals get, right there)…that all is on the team. Consider that the first 21 of the Jaguars’ 31 points required the offense to move a total of 47 yards between the three scores (1 yard drive, 46 yard drive, defensive touchdown). But there were also blatant officiating errors at absolutely critical times: no holding called on Barnes on MJD’s 10-yard touchdown run when it was clear on screen that Larry Foote was getting dragged to the ground by his jersey and occurred immediately in front of the head linesman, who is responsible for watching for penalties at the LoS; holding called against Sean Mahan on the successful two-point conversion attempt that was reversed for the penalty, when replay shows both of Mahan’s hands clearly in view for the entirety of the play, and they did not grab a hold of anything; Hines Ward being slammed to the ground five yards out of bounds and no unnecessary roughness being called. These aren’t all the bad calls; these are just the ones that were so painfully obvious not just on replay but in live action that everyone watching on TV could see them. On one play in particular, John Madden shows a replay of Barnes blocking James Harrison and starts talking about how good of a job Barnes was doing. The problem with the replay was that Barnes had handfuls of jersey on the ends of both of Harrison’s sleeves. You can grab the jersey as long as it is inside the shoulders and in the front, but anything outside the shoulders or from behind is the very definition of holding. And Barnes wasn’t doing it on that play with one hand, he was doing it with BOTH hands.

    That’s what we’re so worked up about. But, unlike Seahawks fans, we also realize that the team played badly enough that those calls actually meant something in the outcome. If they played the whole game like they did in the 4th quarter, we would have won by 40 points. But the players and coaches all dropped the ball for three quarters, so the officiating is a talking point but nothing more than that.

16. Tmac says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 8:01 am

    Cowher’s team wouldn’t be so under prepared, in the playoffs no less? Did you only watch the 2005 season of Cowher’s tenure with the Steelers? The Chargers game in AFC championship game, the Colts AFC championship (even though they won), the drumming by the Patriots in the division round, the Patriots AFC championship game (both of them), and the Broncos AFC championship. They were pretty flat and under prepared in Super Bowl extra large but that turned out okay.

    Regular season Cowher was pretty damn good. The late season collapse in 1998 after the Lions fiasco, the beginning of the 2002 season, and the entire 2006 season aren’t his finest examples. His other bad seasons the teams just weren’t any good. But overall he was a regular season God.

    I love Cowher but I think the job Tomlin did this year was incredible. I didn’t agree with everything he did but following a Hall of Fame coach isn’t easy and the Steelers are incredibly fortunate that the Rooney family is pretty damn good at finding a coach.

17. Tmac says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 8:08 am

    I’m just saying whining about the officials doesn’t do anything. The officials are typically very good. They weren’t their best on Saturday but to be honest it was pretty bad on both sides. There were a few missed calls the benefited the Steelers as well.

    I also like to leave my Football God karma on the good side. Every championship team has a call/oversight or two go their way on their run. Hell every team does, you only remember the good teams though.

    The Immaculate Reception used instant reply before it was a rule and actually was against the rules, deflected passes backwards couldn’t be caught or something silly. Kordell Stewart did step out of bounds in AFC Championship game. There was a screen pass in the must win Lions game at the end of the 2005 season when they were coming back with the biggest holding call ever that wasn’t called. The Super Bowl, outside of the Hasslebeck blocking call, they were all the right calls you just usually don’t see them called in the playoffs.

18. DC says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 9:53 am

    This is a weak post and very much what I’d expect from fans of lesser teams. Apparently a few Seahawks have moved into the ranks.

19. PG says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 3:27 pm

    I agree that alot of the calls that were made were terrible, and the none calls were worse. The big thing here is the calls made on scoring plays. Those calls are the hardest to swallow. There should be a change of replay that says calls made when a score is made should be reviewed. I know I’ll get alot of grief for this but lets be honest. If the refs can’t get it right the 1st time they should review it

20. Mike Frazer says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 8:24 pm

    The problem is that allowing a challenge for a hold on a scoring play would make games ridiculously long. Holding is unreviewable for a reason: it happens on every single play. Whether it gets called depends on 1) if an official saw it; 2) how benevolent the particular official is feeling; and 3) sometimes the severity of the penalty. There are a lot of holds that are, according to the letter of the law, technically illegal. But often times it’s so slight and so obviously inadvertent that only the biggest prick of an official would call it.

    But some of the missed calls on Saturday were just too obvious and blatant to be excused.

    I’ve held for years the belief that, while every team has bad calls go against them, it seems that the monumentally bad calls invariably go against the Steelers. Things like the infamous “Toin Coss” come to mind. Or Polamalu’s interception being reversed in the divisional round in 2005 (what, exactly, is a “football move”?). Or the obviously muffed punt in the Chargers game in either 2004 or 2005, I can’t remember which, when we got a PENALTY for recovering a live ball.

    It’s that kind of crap that makes Steelers fans skeptical of NFL officiating, because they are such blatantly bad calls that a five-year-old from Ghana who has never heard of football could make the right call.

21. Original TMac says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 8:43 pm

    Again the most famous play in Steelers/NFL history was a bad call on two counts by the refs. Some would say we Steelers fans have it coming. Man the Immaculate Reception is great though.

    I forgot about that dumb punt ruling. I remember watching that game cussing up a storm over it.

22. puncho says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 8:54 pm

    steelers rule we will be bACK HAVE FAITH

23. Original TMac says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 9:43 pm

    There sure is a lot of talent, plenty to build on. The hard part next year isn’t players though. The Steelers have a BRUTAL schedule in 2008. I’m still excited.

24. Mike Frazer says:
    

    January 8th, 2008 at 10:26 pm

    There are no camera angles that captured the Immaculate Reception’s two key points: who deflected the pass, and did the ball touch the ground? Jack Tatum, the DB who was in coverage has since claimed that the ball did indeed hit him, not Frenchy — even John Madden concurred after the game that, from his point of view, the ball hit Tatum. If that was the case, then it was a legal deflection (at the time, two offensive players other than the QB couldn’t touch the ball consecutively). As to whether it hit the ground, that’s something we will never know for sure. And based on today’s rules, because it was ruled a catch on the field and there is no indisputable evidence to the contrary, it would stand as a catch. So there’s no evidence of any kind that the call on the field was incorrect.

25. Original TMac says:
    

    January 9th, 2008 at 7:36 am

    The biggest legal/nonlegal issue with the Reception is that they used reply before it was a rule. None of it matters though, it was a great play and I do enjoy watching it.

26. puncho says:
    

    January 9th, 2008 at 7:32 pm

    who do you think the steelers will draft

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