I’m not sure what this says about our priorities, but one of the big headlines today is that the lockout strike between the National Football League and the union that represents its referees appears to be over.  Referees are returning to the field, and are expected to officiate tonight’s game.  If you believe the pundits on sports TV and a lot of the guys at my office, this places somewhere between the second coming and the invention of the thong bikini for good news.

Now, I’m a football fan.  I like nothing better than to have the game on the TV on a brisk Sunday afternoon.  But the amount of ink and stress hormones that have been burned over this is shocking.  The issues seem to be:

• The perceived parsimony of the NFL teams when it comes to the comparatively paltry sum satisfying the union’s demands would have cost.
• The manner in which replacement referees ran the games, especially when it came to the calls and penalties they dished out.

On the first point, I have to agree with the pundits.  The NFL could have made all of this go away a month ago by signing a check that would have been dwarfed by the signing bonus for the latest 20-year-old train wreck who won the genetic lottery.  This has been an exercise in “Oh yeah?  Well, your mother!” on their part.

As for the abilities of the replacement refs, I think they’ve been given the wet end of the stick.  All of the experienced NFL refs were off the job.  The best college refs probably didn’t want to get involved because they hope to someday make the big bucks calling touchdowns in the NFL, and nothing deep sixes a prospective job opportunity like being on the list of people who crossed the picket line.  So what the NFL got was the people from lower college strata and below.  These aren’t professionals.  If the NFL was lucky, they got gifted amateurs who got thrown in with the Lions at the very last minute.  Regular refs get weeks of training in the summer, followed by pre-season to get warmed up. These guys got a couple of days to learn the differences between intramural football and the professionals, then they were off to the races without a crew of seasoned veterans to support them.  So the repeated calls for their mass flogging when they made a bad call or didn’t control a game the same way a crew with over a century of collective experience would have might be a bit of overreaction.

But that’s beside the point.  During this labor strife, the Mid-East has gone from smoldering to meltdown.  Iran is not only accelerating its nuclear program, but is making those “Israel really needs to get change of address forms” noises again.  China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the Hottentots are making angry gorilla noises over a few dots of rock in the middle of an ocean that happens to sit over a large reservoir of petroleum.  And most scary of all, there is a projected shortage of bacon that will hit the economy soon, driving normally rational people to the streets in search of pork bellies and salt.

I’m not sure if this is a concerted effort to distract us from what’s going on in the real world.   Maybe it just shows how far gone we are that the labor differences between the owners of teams of grown men who play a children’s game for millions of dollars and the men who wear striped shirts and make sure the players don’t gouge each others’ eyes out get as much or more press than an upcoming presidential election.  Either way, it doesn’t bode well for the Republic.

Can we please get back to watching and caring about football on Sunday and leave the rest of the news cycle for things that actually matter?