The job of a NFL official is not an easy one. Officials have to work as a team, effectively communicate, and manage a game played by a ton of athletic freaks who can get into a fight at any given moment. The current system forces them to throw flags and make calls at their discretion, something that can often result in a ton of errors. But these guys do their best, and the NFL wants everyone to be OK with that.

A Broken System.

It's time for fans and teams to stop accepting the current system in place. In week 1, the NFL admitted that there were sixteen calls that could have gone the Jaguars way.

Sixteen! And several of those non-calls would have given the Jaguars chances to win the game. In this case, it was the officials, and not the players, who would lose the game for the Jaguars. And on Sunday afternoon there was yet another poor call that would result in a lost opportunity for a victory.

The Browns trailed the Ravens by 5 in the fourth quarter, but were driving and close to a score. Terrelle Pryor made a catch and went out of bounds at the 8 yard line. He tried to toss the ball to an official, but ended up hitting a Ravens defender in the process. Pryor was immediately flagged for an unwarranted taunting call, which ruined any chance the Browns might have had for victory. And fans weren't too happy about it either.

The Solution?

The NFL's current system has part time employees working a job that they are currently not experts in. If the NFL wanted quality officiating, they would make all referees full time and try to make them understand that what happened to Terrelle Pryor is not a penalty.

But this is not a full solution, and we need much more than that to fixthis issue.

Coaches should have the ability to challenge penalty calls. The officialwho has too much pride to swallow the fact that he made a mistake would be forced to admit one after taking another look at a play. There's no chance the officials in the Browns Ravens game would have called a penalty on Pryor if they had reviewed the play.

Fans all over America are already lamenting the poor decision to throw a flag on the play and have ripped into the officiating crew for their obvious mistake.

And everyone who isn't a Ravens fan pretty much agreed. Will the NFL really continue to screw teams like the Browns and Jaguars out of wins? Maybe it's intentional, because it would certainly be in the NFL's best interest to do so.

Big Market Teams Get the Calls.

As a Buffalo Bills fan, I've definitely seen my share of bad officiating. The Patriots almost always seem to get all the penalty calls against a team like the Bills because they are a better team and play in a much bigger market.

It would make sense for the NFL to tell officials to call more penalties on teams like the Browns, Lions, Titans, and Jaguars if their objective is to make more money. Those markets are simply not as big as Dallas, New York, and Boston. It's currently in the officials best interest to make calls that are unfavorable to these teams, but at least some of them could be reversed if teams could challenge terrible penalty calls like the one that went against the Browns today.
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