their Mary Kay Cabot confirmed

So much this. The whole concept strikes me as an invention by people who can play all of the notes and none of the music.

My reaction too. If I were those police I’d start arresting security guards, one at a time, for interfering with their business until somebody grasps the difference between a real badge and a fake badge. As for Rodriguez, I hope they throw the book at him.

Excellent questions, and you’ve already hit on part of the answer. In order for this to work well, both parties have to need a resolution badly enough that they aren’t willing to risk it by “gaming” their red line; and both parties must stand to lose if there is no agreement.

I also learned this technique in arbitration / counseling training. Alongside it, we also learned “nbatana”, which is not a Xhosa word but stands for “next best alternative to a negotiated agreement”. This means that everybody should be aware of what they will be left with if no agreement is reached; this helps them…

If they do it at the 50 yard line, I suspect the officials would use their discretion, call offsetting penalties, and we’d go on with our lives.

So, overpromoted... kind of like Jim Zorn?

Bonus: it barely matters. Since 2012, there have been 65 OT games in the NFL, and the team receiving first possession has won 33 of them. So OT is basically a coin toss regardless.

Yeah, there is a school of thought that says if the whole crew were players’ wives, they wouldn’t miss a single infraction.

Yes. I think the evidence presented above proves exactly that, especially given the objective facts that show she has nothing to do with all but one of these errors (plus the major screw-up from late last year, before she was on the crew). Given the undisputed and indisputable evidence, either she’s a witch who has…

A few years back the Packers ran a trick play very similar to this. I want to say Favre, so that would have been a while back. He acts like he doesn’t like what he’s seeing, then turns and starts to walk back and towards his sideline... without signalling timeout. Defense relaxes, center snaps directly to RB, big…

Yep. And if that job is like any other profession in history, the first woman in typically has to demonstrate herself to be as good as the very best men to be given the same chance that a completely average-performing man would get.

I know it doesn’t make for a good story, but in all likelihood it’s just completely random bad luck. High-profile fuck-ups are pretty rare overall, and if they’re scattered at random through an official’s career, you’re inevitably going to get the odd cluster.

Some people just so desperately want it to be her fault. Quite why they think that which kind of wedding tackle you have is important to running the line is a mystery, but I suspect it calls to some deep need in them to do with “traditional gender roles” or something. As for the “learning on the fly” comment…

So tired of this pre-game crap. I’d like to see the NFL require both teams to stay on their respective sides of the 40 yard lines during warm-ups. Anybody who crosses over to “mingle” with the other team gets a personal foul call and a 15 yard penalty on the kick-off.

p.s. what does it take to get out of the greys around here?

Except that the explanation is a flat-out lie.

Dear Mr. Roth: I call bullshit.

Tim Roth is not some schlub working two minimum wage jobs to put food on the table for his family. In the same year that Up Fifa! Or, a funny thing happened on the way to the numbered Swiss bank account* came out, he had four other credits in IMDB. He has four more already in 2015, with another four jobs listed as…

When I read the headline, my first reaction was “Of course. Haven’t those people suffered enough?”.