With Only Six Days to Prepare, NFL Officials Prepare to Host Raiders in Green Bay

Two months from now we might look back on Monday as the pivotal game in the NFC North.

The referees, hosting a resurgent Lions team, certainly understood the importance of winning at home, but beating Lions head coach Matt Patricia would be no small task. As a former defensive coordinator in New England, Patricia is all too familiar with the referee playbook and would have the Lions ready.

And ready they were.

The Lions jumped out to a 13-0 lead in the second quarter and the referees looked stunned. But the veteran referee crew, led by Clete Blakeman, found answers in the fourth quarter.

”Football shouldn’t be about the players. It should be about us,” Blakeman said after the game. “Coming from New England we knew Patricia wouldn’t fall for a fake rule so we wanted to go a different direction and apply penalties to fouls that didn’t actually occur. I had an index card ready, but credit to our umpire after his laughable hands to the face call early in the fourth quarter, he was able to sneak in another on a late key third-and-five to seal the game.”

When asked for additional comments on the fouls, Blakeman said the referees are focused on the Raiders and diverted any additional questions to Roger Goodell. Fortunately, Goodell is available to the media nearly every day and immediately popped out from behind the curtain to take questions.

Asked about the blown calls, Goodell answered in no uncertain terms.

”As a league, we’re really just focused on social justice matters right now,” Goodell said of the referees. “We’re all laughing at what’s going on between the NBA and China, and we’re looking forward to sending our own Colin Kaepernick to China, hopefully to stay. We’d like him to sit during their national anthem which will promote peace and unity in Hong Kong the way it did here. We’re confident that a gesture like that will be well-received in communist China.”

Certainly, it was good to hear such candid answers on the officiating from Goodell, but it was clear Goodell, too, was focused on the Raiders.

“We hate them and always have,” Goodell said of the Raiders. “We’re unbeaten against them since Jim Plunkett and Tom Flores, but even with all the Super Bowls, we get the last laugh because neither of them will ever see the Hall of Fame. Trust me on that. As for Sunday’s game against the Raiders, we know our officials are working on short test, but we have a plan. We always have a plan for them.”

None of the above quotes from Blakeman or Goodell actually occurred, but neither did the bogus penalties in last night’s game. Plus, it’s all true in principle, right?  

twitter: @raidersbeat