Was there anything better than this weekend to drink a bunch of booze, stuff our faces with too much food and sit around on our asses to watch football from Thursday through Sunday? Don’t answer that, because there wasn’t.
As great as doing nothing but filling our football fix was for the past five days was, plenty of stuff happened that reminded us all that college and pro football players, refs, coaches and fans do some shitty things—and these are the worst from a rivalry week that gave us plenty of interesting moments.
6. Gronk Goes Down
Look, whether or not you’re a New England Patriots fan, if there’s one thing no football fan should ever celebrate it’s seeing the team’s dynamic tight end Rob Gronkowski go down and get carted away after a knee injury.
Hands-down, the biggest bro in sports right now, Gronk is as much of a rager on the field as he is while partying poolside with a bunch of hot chicks during the offseason, and it’s bad for business if one of the biggest stars in the game is out for an extended period of time—especially for a team whose lost a ton of talent in the past couple weeks and has Super Bowl aspirations.
While initial reports leave Pats (and football) fans hopeful that Gronk will get back onto the gridiron sooner rather than later, there’s always a little tension as decisions are being made about a guy’s knee—especially when that guy is a fucking monster like Gronkowski is.
Actually, with the Seahawks’ former Pro Bowler Jimmy Graham going down with a knee injury, too, fuck this week for putting two of the best at their positions on the shelf.
5. Piss-Poor Officiating (Again)
https://platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.jsRemember how last week I wrote about the NFL officiating source who had the balls to suggest one ref had no fucking idea about the correct rule during the end of the Pats-Bills Monday Night game? Yeah, that was nothing compared to the public embarrassment that longtime official Walt Coleman and his crew experienced this weekend.
Coleman, who has been wearing a zebra shirt for a long, long time, seemed to either forget how to speak publicly, had no clue what he was trying to say or, yep, may have just admitted that he threw a couple hundred bucks on the game he was calling between the Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Walt Coleman’s crew has no idea what it is doing. — Chris Burke (@ChrisBurke_SI) November 29, 2015
The botched announcement got pissed on by a bunch of people who saw it live, but Coleman and his crew weren’t the only ones who fucked up royally while calling a game, as fans saw refs in both college and NFL games continuously miss things that even fans knew were miserably wrong.
I don’t know if these guys were just hungover from the weekend’s festivities or not, but it seems like this is a season-long problem that teams are getting screwed over by.
4. 30 Yards Worth Of Penalties ON ONE PLAY By Auburn
https://platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.jsEven if you don’t know jack shit about college football, there’s a good chance that you understand the hatred that the Auburn Tigers and Alabama Crimson Tide have for one another, as the rivalry is, arguably, the biggest in college football. So when these two get together, you know things are going to be testy and could get a little out of control—and that includes coaches losing their shit, sometimes, too.
After a questionable late-hit call on Auburn occurred during a critical fourth quarter drive by Bama, Tigers defensive coordinator Will Muschamp went fucking insane on the sideline, going after refs and having to be held back by other assistants.
When all was said and done, the late-hit penalty with the unsportsmanlike penalty on Muschamp gave the Tide a free 30 free yards, allowing them to move into field goal position to help put away the game.
I’m not saying the outcome would have been any different without those calls, but, shit, the refs dropped the fucking ball at a critical point in a massive rivalry game when emotions run high, and that’s fucked up.
3. The Sad State Of The San Francisco 49ers
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There’s no denying that the San Francisco 49ers are one of the most polarizing franchises in the history of sports, adding great tradition and history with some of the best players to ever suit up. It’s too bad they’re a far fucking cry from that lately, though.
It’s bad enough the Niners sit at 3-8 and seem lost in all aspects of the game, but when a PROFESSIONAL football player drops an interception in the end zone that was gift wrapped for him—as SF’s Tramaine Brock did this weekend—you know shit is all kinds of fucked up.
San Francisco went to three-straight NFC title games and a Super Bowl not too long ago, but with the current roster they have, some bad luck in the past few months and, seemingly, no clue how to play football anymore, this team is a far cry from any of those squads.
2. The ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ Tweet From The Offical Washington Redskins Account
Wishing you and your family a Happy #Thanksgiving. pic.twitter.com/qI3U7hbGhK
— Washington Redskins (@Redskins) November 26, 2015
“”
No words can even describe this, so I’ll just go ahead and leave this here for you to stew on because it has to be the dumbest thing that a pro sports team has ever done on social media, right? For Christ’s sake, you’re a team that EVERYONE seems to hate for having a racist nickname and this is what you send out on Thanksgiving? Just proves that the entire Redskins organization is incompetent.
1. That Dirty Ass, Blindsided Hit During The Western Michigan-Toledo Game
I know that football is a dangerous sport where, at any second, a player can get drilled if they don’t keep their head on a swivel, but blindsided hits are something that EVERY player knows not to do. Or so you would think.
Unfortunately, Western Michigan’s Asantay Brown ignored that rule during his team’s matchup against Toledo this weekend, because he laid into Toledo’s Alonzo Russell with a vicious, helmet-to-helmet hit away from the ball that caused Russell to be carted off on a stretcher.
While Russell was eventually called for targeting and tossed from the game, that’s still not enough punishment for intentionally injuring a dude and, quite possibly, ending their career because of some bullshit decision in the heat of the moment.