The NFL Put on 'The Shield.' Refs and Stars Played Their Roles | Ep 1248

Jason Whitlock (0:00)

Sunday felt like the NFL relaunched one of my all-time favorite TV shows. No, not The Wire, The Shield. And not the NFL Shield, the shield about a rogue Los Angeles cop, Vic Mackey and his strike team. Sunday seemed like a marathon rerun of Vic Mackey's greatest hits.

12 or 14 games finished inside one possession. Three of them felt like the best episodes FX ever aired about one dirty cop's crusade against crime in South Central Los Angeles.

Noon in the Dawg Pound was the pilot. That hour does not ease you in. Vic Mackey leads a raid, decides a cop planet on his own strike team cannot be trusted, and shoots Terry Crowley dead in the head. Sorry for blowing the pilot, but it's amazing. He frames the suspect before anyone in that house can tell the truth. Showrunner Sean Ryan built the whole series on that shock.

Deshaun Watson gave Cleveland the same jolt yesterday. Carolina had the game, then Watson took it, 21-18, and the finish did not feel scheduled. It felt stolen. A quarterback the league had buried stood in that stadium and refused the result everybody else had written. You do not clap for Vic Mackey in that moment. You stare. That is what Watson's finish did inside the Dawg Pound. Then came 3 o'clock in Rio, Brazil.

That was Vic Mackey done playing defense against Lieutenant John Cavanaugh, who's from Internal Affairs, the man built to take Vic Mackey down, and Vic does not beat him in a file room. Vic sleeps with Cavanaugh's ex-wife. You got to see it. You break a hunter by getting inside his house. That is how the show tells you who is actually in charge, the show runners. Lamar Jackson did that to Dallas. Baltimore 34, Dallas 31 On a stage, the league flew across the ocean to sell. The Cowboys came to Rio expecting to be the show.

Lamar threw a dart in the final 10 seconds and set up the winner. Not a check down, a dart. I loved him in that moment. The way you love the man who just proved the hunter was never ready to hunt Vic Mackey. Vic was too big a game for John Cavanaugh, played brilliantly by Forrest Whitaker, by the way.

So then came Late Night in Denver. That was the monster going back. Antoine Mitchell ran his block of Los Angeles on The Shield like he owned the street and the badge. Vic Mackey did not negotiate a sequel. He sent Mitchell back to Lompoc, federal penitentiary and the show let you enjoy the sentencing. The man who bought the result still loses it. Antoine Mitchell was big game. Vic took him down and elevated Anthony Anderson, that's the actor who played Antoine, to his greatest acting performance.

What Antoine did to Shane Vendrell, by the way, is the stuff of TV legend. Anybody that saw The Shield knows exactly when I talk about what I'm talking about when I say, one time, doing time for a long time.

And then Antoine pivoted into something I can't say on this show. What comes after that is a decoration.

It's the most intense moment in cop TV history. I wish I could repeat it. Anyway, Sean Payton and Bo Nix sold that quarterback against the Los Angeles Rams, the best team money can buy. Denver 30, Los Angeles 26 The Rams outgained the Broncos 482 yards to 257 Better team on the depth chart, they still lost. Nix and Payton erased the deficit and sent them home with nothing. Payton prowled that sideline like a man who already knew the verdict. Nix refused the script. The comeback felt like a sentencing.

Football already calls itself The Shield. I tried to keep the television show separate from The Badge. Sunday refused the separation. Sean Ryan in the writers room decided how his episodes ended. The referees decided how these games ended. They were the show runners, the Sean Ryan's of the NFL. We should not be surprised. Watson, Lamar and Nix made the plays. The officials held the rewrite. So what did we witness? One of the most compelling days in NFL history, our games managed for a dramatic ending by referees buried in judgment calls. I loved Watson at noon. I loved Lamar at three. I loved Payton and Nix after dark. I hated the officiating from the first flag to the last. The joy does not acquit the mechanism. A typical NFL game averages 12 to 13 accepted penalties. Ten of the 14 games on Sunday had 16 or more. Cleveland and Carolina had 19 for 147 yards. Denver and Los Angeles had 18 for 129 yards, 13 on the Rams. Rio needed 16 flags and 166 yards to stay one scored game. Five more games hit 17, including Minnesota and Tampa Bay at 176 penalty yards. The finishes I loved were the supervised ones. The hunt for safety built the lever long before any betting act. In October, 2019, the league had already called 1,480 penalties through the five weeks, nearly 19 a game. Offensive holding alone was at 218, with defensive holding, interference, and illegal hands all surging.