THE NFL’S GREATNESS, INCLUDING LAMAR JACKSON, MARRED BY OFFICIATING GRIME

Another substantial referee issue — two, actually — made a mockery of the Dallas-Detroit game, another reminder that a league must maintain integrity with dozens of millions watching and many gambling

     We are watching the man who didn’t hire a negotiating agent, Lamar Jackson, become an all-timer as a dual-threat quarterback. In a league where only the No. 1 seed receives a first-round conference bye, he has led the Baltimore Ravens into the AFC’s pole position, delivering the third perfect passer rating of his career and throwing five touchdown passes Sunday.

     “MVP!” the fans chanted as he pursues his second such award in five seasons, the same number as Patrick Mahomes.

     “Keeping a level head is the most important thing for us right now, because now the narrative is changing,” Jackson said as he roughed up the Miami Dolphins, 56-19. “It was just, ‘This team is ... the Ravens. we don't know about the Ravens.’ Now it's, ‘Oh, they're the No. 1 team.’ So, we're not paying mind to that. I feel like that's bait — that's clickbait. And like I said, we're trying to make it to February, so we're going to take it a game at a time.”

     We’re also observing the San Francisco 49ers, rebounding from a prime-time Ravens thumping, win the NFC’s top seed. It allows them to rest their celestial running back, Christian McCaffrey, the first week and set up the possibility of a Super Bowl rematch against Jackson. Are you starting to like professional football again, after a ragged season of quarterback injuries? The ratings keep soaring, to outrageous numbers in a cord-cutting time, with all three NFL games averaging beyond 27 million viewers on Christmas Day while the NBA’s five games that day averaged an abysmal 2.85 million. Don’t you love Joe Flacco? Or the demise of the Philadelphia Eagles, who have one thing in common with the Kansas City Chiefs, and I refuse to say her name?

     And yet, we keep discussing how the NFL is ravaged by so many incompetent game officials. It happened again in the ugliest way Saturday night, when a crew led by referee Brad Allen blew chunks on two critical plays that took away a Dallas touchdown and later botched Detroit’s two-point conversion. Don’t bother re-watching and retch your New Year’s Eve fare. Just know the league, which recognizes a wretched problem while immersed in gambling and sending bettors on weekly emotional breakdowns, will downgrade Allen’s crew for the stumbles. They should be fired.

     What could have been a 24-13 lead for the Cowboys was not. The crew called their tight end for tripping when, in fact, Lions defender Aidan Hutchinson tried to trip running back Tony Pollard. Dallas settled for a field goal and a 20-13 lead with 1:41 left, which gave the officials one last chance to trainwreck someone. Imagine being the rascal who coaches the Lions, Dan Campbell, and watching your offense score and trim a deficit to 20-19 with just 23 seconds left. The bench informs an offensive lineman, Taylor Decker, to tell Allen that he will be an eligible receiver. A video indeed shows Decker having a conversation with Allen, who said something to the Dallas defense, which didn’t stop Decker from a go-ahead conversion catch that gave Detroit a 21-20 lead. So why did Allen cite Decker for an illegal touching penalty, nullifying the two-pointer, because he didn’t check in as eligible? Wait, didn’t the video indicate the two talked?

     Here’s the screw-up. Decker indeed reported as eligible and a backup offensive tackle, Dan Skipper, did not report to an official. Jared Goff, the Lions quarterback, said the same thing afterward. So did Skipper, who said he had “very few words that aren’t going to get me fined.” Didn’t matter, because Allen said in a post-game pool report that Skipper reported to him and Decker … did not? Did the ref actually confuse Decker, who said he did “exactly what Coach told me to do,” and Skipper?

     “Therefore, he is an ineligible touching a pass that goes beyond the line, which makes it a foul," Allen said of Decker in the report. “So, the issue is, number 70 did report, number 68 did not.”

     So didn’t the official recall his conversation with Decker? Again, Decker on the video? “That conversation is where (Skipper) reports to me, and I then go to the defensive team, and I say to them, ‘(Skipper) has reported as an eligible receiver,’ so they will be aware of who has reported,” Allen said in the report. This is not the first time Allen and his guys have found trouble in games. It happened three other times in recent weeks.

     When dozens of millions are watching postseason games, or 115-plus million on Super Bowl Sunday, the NFL cannot afford the proliferating trail of bad officiating. A league of optimum financial value, the lead player in U.S. entertainment, cannot allow refs to serve during the week in support-one’s-family jobs: a software assurance representative, a rancher, a banker, a sales manager, a non-profit CEO, an attorney, a building official, a tax-rat dude, an aerospace type, an insurance fellow, a money advisor, an inventory monitor, a college professor, a certified public accountant, an athletic director, a high-school administrator, a firefighter, a real estate agent, a pharmaceutical worker and something to do with agribusiness, which is the very soil of our current game action.

     With $120 billion arriving in media money, there is no excuse for Roger Goodell to let zebras dominate discussions as the postseason nears. He should use some of that wealth to hire dozens of healthy people as full-time employees and ditch their real gigs, allowing them to spend months preventing problems that mess up September through February. For years, the commissioner has shrugged off a too-common problem, making a mockery of officials at an owners meeting.

     “Officiating is always a focus for us. I joke, but I’m not joking: I’m (past) 40 years in the league, and I think there’s always a two- or three-week period where there’s an intense focus on it,” Goodell said at a recent owners meeting. “But, listen, you never want to see a game where people are talking about officials afterwards.”

     Seems that’s all we’re doing, each week, ripping refs for falsifying the hallmark of American sports. Are they crooked, too? Or are they so old and doddering that they can’t keep pace in the final minutes? Is the league too busy with other problems, such as Carolina owner David Tepper, who threw a drink in the direction of fans in Jacksonville? So much is happening on and off the field, including the brainpull folly of the Chicago Bears. They actually could keep a quarterback, Justin Fields, who needed all of three seasons to show gumption while possibly passing on another outstanding QB — as they did in C.J. Stroud — with the overall No. 1 draft pick.

     To me, I’d much prefer any scenario with Caleb Williams, who might be the next Lamar Jackson. “He played a perfect football game in terms of the passing game,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. “I don’t know if I’ve seen a more impressive performance in a game.”

     “I love the guy,” Ravens linebacker Patrick Queen said. “He proved everything he had to prove. If anybody else saying otherwise, they just don’t like Lamar. That’s what it is. They don’t like us, they don’t like Baltimore, they don’t like Lamar.”

     But who is participating in these league debates, such as whether Brock Purdy is on track or will throw four more misfires on Feb. 11 in Las Vegas?

     We’re too preoccupied with feeble officials, again and again, never ending as a wobbly new year begins.

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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.