NFL Takes Pete Morelli's Crew Off Prime-Time Game, Reassigns Them To Patriots Game
BOSTON (CBS) -- The NFL has an announcement to make: Referee: Pete Morelli and his officiating crew are not good enough to handle a prime-time game. But they're plenty good enough to officiate the Patriots' game.
Get excited, New England fans -- you're about to get a poorly officiated game for the third straight week!
This news developed Tuesday morning, when Mike Florio reported that Morelli's crew was being taken off the Sunday night game between the Colts and Steelers after that crew performed poorly this past Sunday in the Cardinals-49ers game.
The plot thickened when Chris Mortensen, New England's favorite football reporter, noted that Morelli's crew had been assigned to the Eagles-Patriots game.
Mortensen, to be clear, did not report that Morelli was taken off the Sunday night game. He only reported Morelli's assignment. But when combined with Florio's report, it shows that the NFL is willing to "punish" referees and officiating crews who make mistakes simply by assigning them to different games.
(Brief history lesson: Morelli was the referee for the controversial wild-card playoff game between the Lions and Cowboys this past January. The officiating that day forced the NFL to admit multiple officiating mistakes.)
(More recent history lesson: Morelli's crew on Sunday at one point forgot how to count downs. As in, the officiating crew didn't know what down it was. And that wasn't even the crew's most embarrassing moment of the day.)
This news obviously caught the attention of Marc Bertrand and Scott Zolak, who have spent much of the past 36 hours discussing the officiating in the NFL.
"As I told you all yesterday, do not expect the NFL to do anything at all about their poor officiating. Like ... nothing. Not a thing," Bertrand said. "Now they have. You know what they do now? Shuffle the deck."
"They hide them," Zolak said. "Hey, we'll take 'em off prime time, maybe less people will see 'em."
"Take them off what could be a close game," Hardy added.
"Let's put them on a bad game! That's the solution!" Bertrand said. "This is real! This is a real thing! They have pulled Pete Morelli's crew from Sunday Night Football, they have reassigned him to Patriots-Eagles, 4:25 on Sunday."
Bertrand continued: "Wow. What a league. So everything you saw on Sunday and you saw on the Monday before with Buffalo, get ready for it for a third week in a row, because you've got a crap bag crew of guys coming to town. Get ready for it. That's the NFL. Expect nothing to change, because nothing will, because they just don't care."
Listen to the full discussion below:
