Home Steelers 2015 Season Goodell, Blandino Inaction Helped Fuel Fire Between Steelers and Bengals

Goodell, Blandino Inaction Helped Fuel Fire Between Steelers and Bengals

by Steeldad

Does the phrase “asleep at the wheel” make any sense to you? While its’ factual interpretation can lead to something quite scary including great bodily harm and even death, its’ more typical use and meaning in our world is “not paying attention to a damn thing.”

There’s no question in my mind that much of the nastiness and ugliness of the Steelers’ 33-20 win over Cincinnati could have been avoided had NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and his Vice-President of Officiating Dean Blandino paid a lick of attention. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the players for either team should be given a free pass for their behavior yesterday or in earlier match-up this season.

They have a serious amount of culpability as well but when the cat is away the mice are going to play and these two cats were nowhere to be seen.

Let’s go back to the week eight game in Pittsburgh. The Bengals entered unbeaten and scored 10 points in the final quarter to win 16-10. Earlier in the game, Steelers’ running back Le’Veon Bell was lost for the season on a play where many Steelers’ players saw the Bengals’ Vontaze Burfict “celebrating” as Bell lay in pain on his own sideline.

I’ve watched that play many times and I still can’t definitively say that Burfict was celebrating the injury. It looked to me like he was excited over making a huge stop against one of the league’s top players. Obviously my vantage point isn’t nearly as close as the players’ so I have to defer to them in instances like this whether I agree or not.

Where Goodell and Blandino first started to doze off was with this Twitter exchange started by the Steelers’ Vince Williams.

http://twitter.com/King55Tez/status/661207009069506560/photo/1

You’ll forgive me if I’m not up on my slang but I’m pretty sure Williams is threatening Burfict. I don’t condone Williams’ comment and the Steelers shouldn’t either regardless of what it “actually” means. Goodell and Blandino could have nipped this in the bud immediately but didn’t. The Bengals’ Andrew Whitworth was 100% correct in his postgame comments yesterday when he stated the entire mess was on the hands of the Commissioner.

All this brings us to Sunday. Burfict started the antics before the teams even got onto the field and then committed one of the unwritten sins of football when he crossed the 50 yard line to confront Williams. In my book, Burfict should have been tossed right there but he wasn’t.

Once the game started, Blandino’s minions immediately lost control of the game. While the Steelers weren’t exactly angels, Vontaze Burfict could have easily been flagged any number of times for conduct after the play or in some cases during the play but never did the yellow flag fly in his direction. The officials could have put a stop to all of the nonsense early but instead they chose to let things go and all that decision did was escalate things.

Burfict was finally hit with a 15-yarder when about four minutes remained but by that time the game was no longer in doubt and the tempers and nastiness were out of control.

As I said, both teams should be held accountable. Burfict for the obvious and Williams for a childish and immature tweet but this could have all been avoided had Goodell and Blandino not been asleep at the wheel. Unfortunately it has become an all too common theme for both of them.

Tweet courtesy larrybrownsports.com

Photo courtesy bleacherreport.com

You may also like

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.