Here is your yearly reminder that the more we expect out of the NFL product as a personal enjoyment vehicle and a corporate cash cow to be milked in perpetuity, the less people in charge of the NFL’s future seem to care about how the product continues to actually better itself to satisfy the increasing number of eyes on it. 

On Sunday, Cincinnati Bengals safety Jordan Battle picked up a fumble and, as he approached the goal line, appeared to both lose sight of the ball and catch himself mid-celebration attempt. The ball popped out of his hands like a greased ham and cost the Bengals a touchdown. Shockingly, Battle was not the only player in the NFL to have dropped the ball before he crossed the goal line Sunday (there have been at least three high-profile instances so far in 2024, thanks to New York Jets receiver Malachi Corley in Week 9 and Indianapolis Colts running back Jonathan Taylor, later in the day Sunday).

In another part of the country, there was a situation in the New Orleans Saints–Washington Commanders game where the end-of-quarter clock had hit zero a full six seconds—six!—before the Commanders snapped the ball, missed a kick and were allowed to retry that kick at the beginning of the next quarter. At the end of the game, the game clock was, for some reason, frozen at nine seconds while New Orleans got to the ball, with the referee pool report simply stating that an official mistakenly froze the clock. In a no-timeout situation. With the quarterback desperately needing to spike the ball and having no timeouts.

In yet another part of the country, the Jets, in a tie game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, punched a ball in from the 1-yard line after making their opponent use just one timeout. 

Like any season, the 2024 NFL calendar year has produced no shortage of great moments. But when it comes to the underpinning of the whole thing, it feels less fortified than ever in terms of a sports product. It’s easy to come up with a handful of games off the top of our head that have been destroyed this year by poor officiating (here’s one example I wrote about) and those are just the granular examples that don’t involve several honest to goodness facemask calls so egregious that we double-checked the games weren’t simply a reairing of The Exorcist. Clock management from both quarterbacks and coaches has reached epidemic proportions. The Chicago Bears, in a prime Thanksgiving timeslot just a few weeks ago, dawdled as the final seconds of a game withered away, much to the horror of people who remembered when knowing how to use timeouts or being aware of a game situation was a prerequisite for competing at this level.

Dwindling practice time, and a mercurial ownership base that continues to hire unqualified or unprepared coaches and then fires them before they get good enough to manage a game, are obviously some of the main reasons for why this NFL season in particular feels like it’s being uprooted by a kind of chasm. The gap between competent ownership, coaching and playing vs. incompetent ownership, coaching and playing is more significant than ever, hence nearly a third of the NFL failing to eclipse the five-win mark before the winter solstice.

But it’s more complex than that. We haven’t seen more than a cursory willingness to improve life for officials, and the league has only moderately improved a mechanism to take a brief pause and correct egregiously bad calls. Like many facets of life, this lack of an ability to corral it all in a sensical manner plunges us all into conspiracy—one I don’t subscribe to, but one that is harder to contain within a fan and reader base that would much easier believe the NFL is ignoring blatant holding calls in order to promote Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce in big games than the truth, which is that officiating an NFL game is impossible and that these crews need more help. 

In New York City, the Rockettes have refined their performance to a specific number of kicks per show. Every member has to be a uniform height. It’s the precision, in part, that helps the show maintain its audience. People come in expecting to be mesmerized in the same way we watch synchronized diving or gymnastics. With the NFL, the lack of precision has become part of the draw. And, I assume, it’s just as well that you could build a version of the Rockettes in which dozens of women in heels kick one another and fall off the stage, but after a while it would leave us feeling a bit numb and silly, wouldn’t it? 

And it’s that excusal on our parts that is part of the problem. The pivot from sporting product to entertainment product is applauded. We praise Woody Johnson for garnering attention. We praise Jerry Jones for being a good businessperson. We recognize the glitch that seems to be so pervasive these days: In the absence of actual, practiced skill, we award kicking (just not through the uprights, apparently), screaming, spending and other forms of unearned ridiculousness. For some reason, there’s only a quiet reverence paid to consistent winners and even fewer people lining up to copy them. We can say that the Greatest Show on Turf had practices so crisp and clean that not a single football touched the ground, but counter that with the fact that an entire nation’s worth of people now watch the game more than they did back then.

All of this to say … what, exactly? Right now, at its worst, it simply makes us all sound like boomers complaining about how it used to be without the perspective that what used to be wasn’t all that great, either. At worst, we turn it off because it feels silly to spend any serious amount of time devoted to something so ultimately ridiculous. A man—no, men!—who can’t simply cross a line before tossing a ball in the air. For now, when we put it this way, it doesn’t seem so bad. Then again, has it been this bad?