MEMO TO GAMBLERS AND EAGLES FANS: IT WAS A HOLDING PENALTY, FOOLS

The essence of sport is to apply rules when infractions occur, even in the final minutes of a Super Bowl, and the NFL invites backlash when it courts 50.4 million adults betting $16 billion on a game

     This is where I separate real sports cognoscenti from the fanboys, rioters, drop-by casualists, overindulging gamblers and people who allow pure athletic competition to be overwhelmed by personal whims. You know: unhinged civic pride, prop bets, high-roller bets, whether or not a pregnant Rihanna was lip-synching, why Ben Affleck should consider an actual career at Dunkin’ and other such intelligence-insulting nonsense.

     What could have been the best of 57 Super Bowls screeched to a limp halt, all oxygen sucked from a stadium in Arizona with 1:48 left in the fourth quarter. The game ended because James Bradberry, the Philadelphia cornerback, held the jersey of Kansas City receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, who was impeded from catching Patrick Mahomes’ end-zone lob on 3rd-and-8. A defensive holding call allowed the Kansas City Chiefs to drain the clock, drill the winning field goal with 11 seconds remaining and begin Mahomes’ coronation as the G.O.T.H., or Greatest Of Tom Heirs in a post-Brady quarterbacking economy.

     And guess what? It WAS a holding penalty, if that matters. The same rules that apply in Week 1, the rules that apply during a Houston-Chicago dogbreath game in Week 18, also should apply in the final decisive minutes on Super Bowl Sunday. Even Bradberry stood by his locker for 20 minutes and acknowledged, to wave after media wave, that he committed the infraction. Isn’t that enough for everyone to just shut up, deal with the lost wagers, stop fighting with police officers in Philly and please go home?

     “It was a holding. I tugged his jersey,” Bradberry said. “I was hoping they’d let it slide. … But of course, he’s a ref, it was a big game. It was a hold, so they called it.”

     So what would you like the NFL to do in that moment? Ignore the hold, the arm around Smith-Schuster’s waist, to serve your entertainment or monetary purposes? Sure, forget the rules. Make your life better, see if Harrison Butker can kick a longer field goal after doinking an earlier kick, then see if Jalen Hurts can lead a scoring march and let a drunken city sing “Fly, Eagles Fly.” Sure, ignore the hold so you can win your bet and climb your greased poles.

     “An epic Super Bowl ends with a whimper,” read a headline in The Athletic, above a story from a newsletter writer who regularly makes picks against point spreads. The bro-dude actually wrote: “Is it defensive holding? Maybe! Does it feel wrong to call it right there, to essentially decide the most important game of a football season? Absolutely.”

     It serves these people right that the game ended how it did. They have no respect for sports. The Super Bowl is not played for THEM. The Super Bowl is played to determine a champion and establish legends for the entirety of 115 million viewers, most of whom don’t bet and many of whom simply like to enjoy America’s grandest annual spectacle. What is the point of having a rule book if penalties aren’t flagged in the most consequential moments?

     Explained referee Carl Cheffers, calling it “a clear case” with no debate among officiating crew members: “The receiver went to the inside and he was attempting to release to the outside. The defender grabbed the jersey with his right hand and restricted him from releasing to the outside. So, therefore, we called defensive holding.”

     Duh.

     All of which feeds the perception that the NFL has an officiating crisis. If that is an oversimplification — yes, calls are missed by officials, some better than others — also understand that it’s a byproduct of pouting gamblers who insist games are fixed when they lose their bets. More than $16 billion was wagered on the game by a record 50.4 million adults in the U.S, a 61 percent spike from last year’s Super Bowl. That means the psyches of generally rational human beings are swayed by officiating calls. And when one particular call decides a championship, all hell breaks loose, even when the call is correct.

     The problem isn’t officiating. The bigger problem: In 2018, the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize commercial sports gambling, prompting a nationwide epidemic of betting that poisons the essence of sport and causes too many people to lose their minds, savings, jobs and families. The problem is that the NFL and its media partners short-shrift the gambling crisis, too busy splashing around in their new and flourishing revenue streams to effectively educate about vices. For the hell of it, after one of countless ads from DraftKings and FanDuel and other companies using Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx to wave gambling cocaine into gullible faces, I called the 1-800-GAMBLER hotline number required by law during a typical 30-second ad. It allows vulnerable bettors to speak with a counselor, if they so choose.

     A recorded voice offered me a “special promotion” for “select callers” over age 50 before I was handed off to a specialist. WTF? I didn’t inquire about the special promotion, and by Monday morning, the promotion option was gone, replaced by a more serious voice on a “California Problem Gambling Helpline.” What in the name of Yasiel Puig was that about? Wouldn’t an immediate investigation be the next step? Don’t count on it. The Supreme Court justices are too busy with their own parlays.

     The NFL asked for this. When commissioner Roger Goodell and the owners jumped headlong into gambling mania, after decades of resistance, they should have known backlash was coming. Goodell didn’t help his cause when he grew defiant about officiating last week in Phoenix, contending, “I don't think it's ever been better in the league. There are over 42,000 plays in a season. Multiple infractions can occur on any play. Take that out or extrapolate that. That's hundreds if not millions of potential fouls. And our officials do an extraordinary job of getting those. Are there mistakes in the context of that? Yes, they are not perfect and officiating never will be.”

     Once a league courts 50.4 million people gambling more than $16 billion on a single Super Bowl, the commissioner must reassure those customers — and all of us, really — that the league always is fine-tuning its officiating. He can’t be rude about it, or he leaves an impression that he only cares about annual revenues projected at $25 billion by 2027.

     Nor does the league care enough to do proper diligence about the playing surface. Despite the pre-game presence of legendary George “The Sodfather” Toma, who worked his 57th and last Super Bowl at age 94, the field at State Farm Stadium was a slip-sliding debacle. Players on both teams were falling, changing cleats, having difficulty gaining and maintaining footing. Again, this was a championship game watched by 115 million people. And a $19-billion-a-year league can’t get the turf right? As it is, players have been lobbying for all-grass fields to protect themselves from serious injuries. Now, there is this, at a stadium infamous for slippery fields in previous high-profile football events.

     “The field was kind of terrible," Chiefs defensive lineman Frank Clark said in the winning locker room. “We've had this problem in Arizona before. A lot of these stadiums try to do new tactics with the grass, they try to do new things. I've been playing football since I was 7. The best grass is grass that is naturally there. At the end of the day, it was the field that we were given."

     “It was just slick. You couldn't anchor,” Eagles offensive lineman Jordan Mailata said. “You had to get your whole foot in the ground. If you try and use just your toe, you'd slip right away. You saw the receivers — it was like a water park out there. And we're playing on grass.”

     Imagine that: a water park in the desert. And the NFL let it happen. Maybe Goodell and the owners are oblivious once they board their private jets, count their profits and vanish for months. But angry people are out there, and at some point, they might storm the league’s Manhattan offices at 345 Park Avenue. I don’t feel sorry for those people. I don’t feel sorry for the league, either.

     They all kind of deserve each other.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.