Your “[DFO] Hate Week” Thursday Evening Open Thread

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the fourth day of [DFO]’s annual Super Bowl tradition – Hate Week.

This is the annual airing of grievances we have about life, football, society… really, anything is in-bounds outside of the usual hot buttons. It’s been a pretty good week so far, and what people have brought up from their recesses has been darkly impressive. I also appreciate how we’ve seemingly agreed to cap the nightly comments at 69 – tributes to tWBS never go out of style.

As always, I am assisted in the photoshop department by fellow hater – see Wednesday – and Despiser of All Things Spanos, Low Commander.

As you can see, he feels better for having emptied his bowl of bile at Dean Spanos yesterday. Because that’s what Hate Week is all about – liberation for the soul.

With that in mind, let’s wrap this shit up in style.

Tonight’s theme: Shitty NFL Refereeing

Two words:

Kadarius. Toney.

The ref threw the flag long before the play developed into one of the coolest things we’d seen all year.

Honestly, after watching that Kelce deserves to be with Taylor, simply because he does see the whole field. Sure, the ref was right, but in the end it didn’t matter because the Chiefs are in The Big Game^© anyway.

Of course, the quality of the officiating in the league is nothing new. One just needs to look back through the seasons to find multiple examples. These ones just popped into my head at random: 

• The “failure to declare” Lions-Cowboys game from this year.

• The non-PI call against the Rams when they took out the Saints on their way to losing the Super Bowl to the Patriots in 2019.

• The “Fail Mary” game, which ended the officials strike.

But to truly start the hate for officials leading into this year’s Super Bowl, we have to go back one calendar year to the last one, which started this year’s round of “SupER bOWL RigGeD!!1!1!”

2023 Super Bowl: Chiefs 38 – Eagles 35

Whether or not you think it was holding,

the fact remains that questionable calls like this feed a disgruntled narrative that exists among fanbases that “The League” or “Roger Goodell” is out to get them to the benefit of “another”.

Of course, this is absurd. Your local team doesn’t care about you – ask Oakland or San Diego fans about that. The contempt the owners have for their local fanbase is the epitome of a parasocial relationship. They didn’t get the millions they wanted from the local government, so they fucked off to the first place that would, leaving the fans with nothing to show for their years of devotion. The same goes for every team. Not for one second do I think the Seahawks care about me beyond “So, Beerguy, your AMEX was declined… do you have another credit card we could use for the renewal?” 

And Roger Goodell?

Frankly, I don’t want him to know that I exist, because that means I travel in company which prevents me from being my usual irascible self. Plus, the second he finds out about [DFO] we are getting so many takedown notices our tech support is going to quit & go on to a less-stressful position at Windows.

——————————————————

Fortunately, there are a whole bunch of haters on Al Gore’s internet who have much more free time available (between, I assume, court dates) than the average Commentist. As such, I have found one YouTube that will satisfy my need for accounting the most wretched calls of the year.

Naturally, because it has NFL highlights on it, my good friend Roger has had his lawyers prevent it from being shown on this-here website. But if you do have 20 available minutes, you’ll see calls like:

• Bobby Okereke getting the softest roughing the passer call against Josh Allen,

Bobby Okereke was called for roughing the passer here against Josh Allen.

Absolutely not a penalty. pic.twitter.com/dI1Bb3bJhf

— Doug Rush (@TheDougRush) October 16, 2023

• the refs feeding the narrative by calling PI on Sauce Gardner,

That flag toss was a little late by the 🦓…pic.twitter.com/Ny9xpT8LWL

— Darius Butler (@DariusJButler) October 2, 2023

• the Steelers getting almost a full yard of favourable spot when the Rams couldn’t challenge,

Controversial finish to the Steelers-Rams game.

Pittsburgh goes for it on fourth-and-short. Kenny Pickett looks to be short on a QB sneak, but the officials give him the first down.

The Rams didn't have a time-out and could not challenge. So the spot stood, ending the game. pic.twitter.com/bkhKPjsIpe

— The Comeback (@thecomeback) October 22, 2023

• more enhancing of the Saints persecution complex when this was called unnecessary roughness,

New Orleans gets “worst call of the year” every year. Never in our benefit. https://t.co/AzH6u5eGAb

— iamvic (@vfcampos11) December 17, 2023

And finally, my personal favourite, when Simone Biles’ husband got an unnecessary roughness call when he hit Patrick Mahomes in bounds.

Packers got hit with an unnecessary roughness penalty for hitting Mahomes while he was still inbounds #KCvsGB pic.twitter.com/qDJdxjNSFM

— Bad Sports Refs (@BadSportsRefs) December 4, 2023

Dogshit. The whole end of that game was just one fuckup after another. Just a series of bad calls, as if a challenge had been laid down to see who could cause Terry McAulay to burst an aorta.

It’s gotten to the point that guys like RGIII are creating conspiracy theories about refs favouring their home teams or childhood favourite. He’s obviously not the only one who thinks that, but because he’s behind a desk and not on the field there’s little the league can do without raising suspicious and, in that way, somewhat confirming the allegations. That will not ingratiate him with Roger Goodell, who expects the employees of media “partners” to be obsequious in nature.

——————————————————

All of this brings us to the topic of

The ref for The Big Game (™) is Bill Vinovich. Ironically, or conspiratorially, he’s the same ref who did the last KC-Niners Super Bowl.

Knowing this, the stats wizards employed at every betting site have the teams’ respective records when Vinovich refs their games:

• 49ers: 2-4 (0-1 in 2023)
• Chiefs: 5-2 (0-0 in 2023)

Well, I guess we know who wins the game here.

He’s also the referee whose crew missed the PI call in the Rams-Saints conference final in January 2019.

Depending on your narrative perspective from Wednesday’s thread, this is either more rigging by the NFL or people grasping at straws. I can’t wait to watch all the MAGA retards lose their minds when Vinovich helps Taylor’s boyfriend win the game because his granddaughter has tickets to the Eras tour.

I guess there’s no point watching the game, then. Nice work, Roger.

Fuck you.

Tonight’s sports:

• NHL:
  • Canucks vs. Bruins – 7:00pm | Sportsnet
  • Lightning vs. Islanders – 8:00pm | ESPN
  • Vegas vs. Arizona – 9:00pm | Sportsnet360
• NBA:
  • Warriors vs. Pacers – 7:00pm | Sportsnet1
  • Mavs vs. Knicks – 7:30pm | TNT / TSN4
  • Nuggets vs. Lakers – 10:00pm | TNT / TSN3,4
• Beisbol:
  • La Serie del Caribe (Semifinal)
  • Colombia vs. Venezuela – 8:00pm | ESPN Deportes

Well, that’s it for my part of [DFO] Hate Week 2024. I hope you enjoyed what Low Commander and I put together for you. There’s some sexiness on-deck tomorrow, and possibly a surprise or two on the weekend before we all gather back here on Sunday to see whether the powers of good or evil prevail.

Until then,