RUSH: I must offer my condolences to fans of the New Orleans Saints. What… (sigh) What a travesty. I mean, the way they ended up losing that game… I know there are ways they could have still won in overtime. I know that there are things that could have happened. But such a blatantly bad call to be overlooked by every official on the field, including the side judge and I think the headline linesman monitoring play? It was so obviously pass interference. And it’s a devastating thing. It’s not like you’ve got next week to come back and play again. They’re out!
And also, condolences to fans in Kansas City. You need a defense. I mean, you can talk all you want about Brady and his precise passing — and you have to mention that. Pshew! It’s incredible to watch Tom Brady play football.
And Tony Romo. I tell you, folks, if you don’t know anything about football and you watch it, make sure you’re watching Jim Nantz and Tony Romo on Sunday afternoon. They’re the best complement going out there. They’re right next to Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth.
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RUSH: Mobile, Alabama. Jeff, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. First-time caller. I’ve listened to you my whole life. I gotta admit, today I’m pretty devastated. I’m a Saints fan. I went to the game. I’m a season ticket holder — and for those who don’t know, I believe the Saints were essentially robbed of an NFC Championship by a blatant miss on a pass-interference call. You know, the league called Sean Payton after the game and said, “Oh, we made a mistake.”
But the Rams go to the Super Bowl. Then Michael Thomas, the wide receiver, tweets out part of the NFL Rulebook, “Rule 17 Section 2 Article 3,” and it’s the “extraordinarily unfair acts.” Essentially what it says is if anything happens during the game which is a blatant violation of the rules, the commissioner not only has the right to void the ending of the game or the game after that point, but he can void the entire game and reschedule a new game. And I think that would be the just outcome in this case.
RUSH: There’s something else. By the way, this is correct. These extraordinary powers are written in the official rules of the NFL Rulebook. The commissioner could also void everything that happened after that. Tell the teams get back on the field and pick up the play from exactly that point. Redo the play. You know, either call it pass interference or not. You could either give the Saints the ball on a… You can call the penalty and then give them the ball with essentially the game over at that point. The commissioner can do all of that, or he can have the whole game replayed or whatever. Nobody expects that to happen.
CALLER: I wish… I wish Roger Goodell had the courage to do it. Now, historically he’s not been a friend to the Saints, with the Bountygate and all that. But —
RUSH: Well, let me… Can you hang on during the break? I’ve gotta break in 10 seconds here and there’s a whole bunch of stuff involved in this that I actually… I want to take the occasion to say that goes beyond just what happened in that game that I think is symptomatic of much other things.
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RUSH: Okay, back to Jeff in Mobile, Alabama.
CALLER: Yep!
RUSH: Jeff, this stuff is very… It’s very bad. I think that this was clearly a failure of what most people considered a reliable institution to get things right — in this case, the National Football League. As a fan, you trust that games are gonna be legitimate —
CALLER: I agree.
RUSH: — that there aren’t gonna be what look to be purposeful errors or incompetent errors, not at this level.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: At this level, you’ve got the best you can be. You got the best refs; you got the best players.
CALLER: And the ref… The two refs who were actually closest to the play were from Los Angeles. They live in the City of Los Angeles.
RUSH: Well, see, this is what happens. What happens is that all of these conspiracy rumors begin. The most popular rumor going around — not “rumor,” theory — is the NFL needs the move to Los Angeles to work. It’s too much money involved. They’re spending billions and billions on a stadium. They’ve got to excite the fan base out there. Even now, the Rams’ home games are more populated by fans of the visiting team than for the Rams. They’ve got to have this work, and so they need the Rams in the Super Bowl, and they need LA as a home market in the Super Bowl for TV ratings. These are the conspiracy theories being bandied about. That, to me, may or may not… I don’t know. But I’ll tell you —
CALLER: No, I don’t believe that. But, I mean, the Rams fan base needs help. I’ll tell you at the game yesterday… I mean, the Eagles game the week before was like 10% Eagles. I couldn’t believe these people came from Philadelphia. But the Rams game? I mean, I saw five, six — during my entire time there — people in Rams jerseys. I mean, they don’t have a fan base, as far as I can tell.
RUSH: Well, that’s why teams left LA. That’s why the Rams left and I think left twice. But here’s the bigger problem. Well, there’s two things. You know where this is gonna get fixed, Jeff, old buddy, old pal? You want to know the real great irony of how this is gonna be fixed? We’re in the process in this country of legalizing gambling. It’s legal in Jersey. It’s legal in Las Vegas. States want in on this action. That means… Do you know how many people probably lost a kit and caboodle of money yesterday on this flagrant mistake?
If this keeps up, the gambling community (i.e., the vice guys) are gonna be responsible for fixing this. Money talks, and if the league doesn’t get this right, the gambling interests are gonna have to. Because if you’re gonna bet legally on a game and something like this happens that causes you to lose where you’re looking a big haul, and then all of a sudden (because of the incompetent referee call), you end up losing big?
Gambling interests cannot put up with that. This is down the road, but I find it extremely ironic that the vice industry may end up being the primary mover in cleaning this stuff up. I’m not making a claim on whether or not this call was mandated. I don’t even want to go there. I’m just gonna chalk it up to incompetence. I don’t even want to feed that theory. But I’ll tell you, there’s a larger element here to me, and it is the increasing failure of trusted institutions to get things right and to be fair about it.
The greatest example right now of this being bastardized is the FBI leadership under Barack Obama, the Department of Justice leadership under Barack Obama. This entire obscene mess — this so-called collusion between Trump and Russia and this needless, wasteful, damaging, and ruining Mueller investigation — is one of the greatest bits of damage to a trusted institution in our country that I can remember, and it’s been done from within.
The FBI has had people in its leadership during the Obama administration who have just caused great damage to the trust and reliability that people have for the FBI. The Department of Justice is the epitome of where people expect there to be no political corruption and fairness. It’s already… If you find yourself up against the government in trial or in some kind of legal case, you’re already up against the 8-ball because they have all the money in the world and you don’t have any.
The federal conviction rate’s 95%. So because of that, everybody has to appear to be overboard in this idea that you are innocent until proven guilty. Well, that’s out the window now. Donald Trump hasn’t been innocent since he declared for the presidency. He’s been guilty, and there’s been a two-year witch hunt to try to find evidence of it — and failing finding evidence, they’ve been trying to create public opinion that Trump is dirty so as to lower his opinion numbers.
And everywhere you look… The Catholic Church is letting down its parishioners in ways after ways after ways, and all other religions are doing the same thing. They are failing to stand up for church teachings and they are bowing to societal political pressure. The National Football League… Look what they were on the verge of having destroyed, their entire industry, by the kneeling and the disrespect for the flag. And if it weren’t for Trump calling that out and stopping it…
NFL TV ratings are coming back, although the Saints-Rams game numbers were down from a year ago. The Chiefs-Patriots game was up over a year ago, same windows measuring ratings. If people watching the National Football League — and this is not new. This call is one of many. This is one of the most blatantly incompetent calls in recent memory. If the fans — and I’m not even talking about the gambling community yet, and there’s a lot of them when you start factoring in fantasy football players, fantasy football leagues among fans.
When you get to the point that the outcome of the game is not trusted at kickoff… If the fans — the ardent fans, the people that financially support the league buying tickets, buying products of sponsors on telecasts, buying licensed merchandise. If those people begin to lose faith and lose trust that what they’re watching is fair with an outcome that’s not predetermined — if they lose that — that’s gonna be a hellacious long time to get it back, and that’s why calls like last night’s are abhorrent!
There is no excuse. With all of the cameras in stadiums now and with all of the replay opportunities, for those kinds of plays to not be reviewable when the evidence is clear and the mechanism for getting it right is there? To have it not be used because, “Well, we can’t replay everything! Look at the length of time the game’s going to be.” You better get it right! The length the game isn’t gonna matter if there are fewer and fewer people watching them. But, folks, my point is it’s not just the NFL.
It is so many institutions that have been the backbone of our country, which are beginning to weaken and fall apart, becoming untrustworthy, and it’s beginning to infect everything. It’s infecting way too much. When it starts infecting… When we have a two-tiered justice system… When Democrats are not even investigated, as in Hillary Clinton and this phony dossier and the email scandal, trafficking in classified documents, and the evidence laid out for us by the FBI director who then exonerates her?
But yet Donald Trump — who is a Republican who the FBI hates, the FBI leadership and Barack Obama hated — when he hasn’t done anything, is systematically destroyed by the legal system and by the law enforcement departments of this country. No good can come of that. Even if Democrats win the next elections, no good can come of this. Now, we’ve never been perfect. There always have been mistakes made. Institutions that have always been trustworthy make mistakes, but they have been forgiven and they have been overlooked because the popular opinion has been that these institutions are still valuable and that they work.
But it seems like every week, every month, every year there is another gigantic failure somewhere that causes more and more people to think that everything’s rigged or preordained or unfair, however you want to define it. It’s not just the Saints-Rams game, is my point — and that was a flagrant, outrageous example of injustice. I don’t mean “injustice.” I don’t mean to talk about it in a legal sense. But the Saints got jobbed, and there was a way to fix it that was unusable because the rules do not, at present, permit it.
But the rule book does permit the commissioner to step in and say, “This is an extraordinary example and I’m gonna have the game replayed from that point.” He could do that. The rulebook allows him to throw this game out and do another one if he deems it crucial to preserving the integrity of the business, of the sport. But I’m telling you, there are a lot of people — a lot of people — who are not particularly fans of either team who are forever gonna question the legitimacy of the Los Angeles Rams being in the Super Bowl.
That’s not good for the league. It’s not good for the Rams. It’s not good for anybody in that business. And, by the same token, more and more people are not trusting government institutions like the Department of Justice and like the FBI? And when they are run by leftist Democrats or socialists, it makes every bit of sense in the world not to trust ’em, because they provide the evidence that they’re not trustworthy each and every day.
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RUSH: How many football fans today sit down to watch a game fully aware that a bunch of bizarre things are gonna happen with replay, that there’s gonna be all kinds of stoppages? Questions over what was a catch, what wasn’t a catch. Somebody in bounds or out. Everybody watches this knowing. When there’s this much involvement by virtue of high-tech innovation, technology enabling replay precision… The more it’s available, the more it’s gonna be used.
And it just leads to increased frustration watching football games today. That’s why all the kneeling and protesting was so abhorrent, because it’s already frustrating enough. Just watching a game, trying to trust that all the bizarre things that are gonna happen are gonna be right, are gonna be judged to be right, or judged correctly. It’s an emotional roller coaster here beyond just fans.