The Call

Much has been said about THE CALL made in the Canadian Football League game Saturday between the Saskatchewan RoughRiders and the Calgary Stampeders. You remember! The Call
John Chick is called for unnecessary roughness for landing on Henry Burris after he had fallen down. Instead of leaving Calgary with a 3rd and 40 plus yards, the Stampeders received a fresh set of downs and scored a touchdown. The end result being a
44 - 44 tie with Saskatchewan in the battle for first place.
Well, oh this is hard, gulp, gulp, it appears the CFL referee made the correct call. Correct that is if you go by the CFL rule book which of course all referees must do.
The rule states that if a player is down, unable to further advance and if an opponent jumps or lands on top of him its unnecessary roughness. Well Burris was down, the question is was he unable to advance? In the eyes of the official he wasn't and therefore the call (gulp, gulp) is correct. So it wasn't the referee that cost the Riders the win, it was the rule book. Or if you
want to come right down to it, John Chick made an error. Had Chick just done the hand touch, according to the CFL the play would have been whistled to an end. No harm, no foul.
So there you have it. In this case, the referee may have made the right call but that doesn't change my mind much about the
officiating in the CFL. Sometimes it is downright awful. Most times its just plain bad. A friend of mine summed it up best this morning. He said " Everytime there is a big play, you look for a flag. If you're team made the big play, you hope there isn't a flag thrown. If the big play is made against your team you hope that a flag will be thrown. In a professional football league it shouldn't be that way, should it?
At any rate that is my half assed apology to the CFL who on Saturday made THE CALL