There has been a lot of talk if the NFL officials assisted the Steelers in their Super Bowl Victory. Our SBNation's Revenge of the Birds wrote about it, as did the Bleacher Report. There were a LOT of arguments made that the last Super Bowl the Steelers won against the Seahawks was the worst officiated Super Bowl of all-time in favor of the terrible towels. Some of the questionable calls of Super Bowl XLIII include:
No penalty when Santonio Holmes did his post-TD celebration using the football as a prop.
Roughing the holder on a kick. Adrian Wilson clearly did not try it. Shouldn't that have been possibly a five-yard penalty?
A 15-yard facemask was called against, if I recall, Rodgers-Cromartie against Holmes, when both were grabbing each other's facemask, yet there was still no "head-turning" that occurred. Therefore, there never should have been a call. The rulebook states the player's head has to be jerked or moved in order to call a 15-yard penalty
Not going to instant replay on the final play of the game regarding Kurt Warner's fumble/pass incompletion.
A couple of these seem stretches to me, but the glaring two are the missed celebratory TD penalty on Santonio and the decision not to go to instant replay on the final turnover. The PTI guys said last night that the booth actually did take a quick review of the final play while teams were changing sides and that to them, they saw it as a fumble, so hence no need to call it down to the lead official. That is idiotic in my mind. We need games that don't end in controversy. Take the extra 2 minutes to review it and get it right.
The missed Holmes celebratory penalty ended up being HUGE. That 15-yard penalty would have meant MUCH better starting field position for the Cards, who had two time outs left. Instead, they had to start from their own 23.
What do you think? Do the Cards' fans have a legit case the NFL/refs favor the yellow and black, or are they just whining? I was at a club with 1000 people so my attention was not on the TV as much as it should have. The 2 articles mentioned above only mention the missed penalties favoring the Cards. Did the Steelers have any ludicrous calls go against them?