Super Bowl Whiners

The finest team ever won Super Bowl XL last Sunday, and make no mistake: the better team won. No, it wasn't the most beautiful game ever. The Steelers faltered in the beginning and didn't truly get going until the second quarter.

Today I see Seattle fans and Pittsburgh haters (re: people who hate the game of football) whining about the bad officiating and how that was the only reason that the Steelers won. In particular, there are two calls they mention:

1. An offensive pass interference call against Seattle early in the first quarter that led to a 'Hawks touchdown being overturned. Accounts will vary. Some insist that Jackson didn't even touch Chris Hope. These people are blind. Even a full-speed replay shows Jackson's hand making contact with Hope's chest, right in the numbers, and Hope's entire body bouncing back in response. It wasn't a hard shove. But contact was made to the front of the torso -- and that, football fans, is pass interference. Others will insist that pass interference was committed in name only: the shove was not used to create separation between receiver and defender. Not true: that shove clearly moved Hope back involuntarily. So it did create separation. And then, there are those who insist that in a big game like the Super Bowl, a minor example of a foul shouldn't have been called. That might be true. But if Jackson is so stupid as to commit a violation right in front of an umpire -- the guy was standing 10 feet away, looking right at him -- then he has no one to blame but himself.
2. Big Ben's first diving touchdown. I admit that the touchdown call could have gone either way -- at least from the views we saw on TV. But you know what? The referees reviewed it and said it was a TD. Still photos showed the football just breaking the line of the endzone. And -- most importantly -- Seattle knows it was a touchdown. They didn't make much a fuss at the time -- just a token protest that you automatically make after every close play. You know why they weren't more vocal? Because they knew. They didn't start whining until afterwards. Fuck them.

In the end, Seattle tried two old refrains:

1. "We beat ourselves with mistakes." Maybe you did. Or maybe Pittsburgh forced them to make those mistakes. Pittsburgh defense might not have gotten its customary gajillion sacks, but it was obviously enough to rattle Seattle to the point of panic.
2. "We still feel we're the better team. We just didn't play our best." Well, Seattle apologists, in case you didn't notice, the Steelers didn't play their best either. Otherwise the score would have been a lot more humiliating for the Seattle Seahawks. Face it: the way you play in the big game is exactly indicative of how good you are. Greatness is defined as the ability to perform on demand. So if you lost -- and you did -- it is exactly because you were the lesser team.