Mellinger Minutes: Refereeing in MLS + KC Chiefs’ L’Jarius Sneed, and missed shots deep
We’re going to do something a little different here at the top. This time of year, it’s a good bet that the top of the timesuck is basically a Chiefs column. You all have been far better to me than I deserve, so you’re familiar with the pattern:
- Insta-reaction a minute or three after the Chiefs’ game.
- Sports Beat Live 90 minutes or so after that.
- Game column shortly after that.
- Then what’s basically another Chiefs column leading off a 6,000-or-so-word timesuck that you people have decided you like, for whatever reason, on Tuesday.
But today, we’re going to start with Sporting Kansas City and something we don’t often talk about: officiating.
Sporting Kansas City got hosed on Decision Day. Referee Ted Unkel missed a handball in the box that should have given Sporting a penalty kick in stoppage time. The Video Assisted Referee — more commonly known in Major League Soccer as VAR — failed here, too, with no second look. It was egregious. Watch for yourself:
That is a penalty 100 times out of 100. If the referee was in a bad spot and missed it, fine, but there is no explanation for VAR missing it as well. Correcting obvious whiffs like this is literally the reason VAR exists. Instead, nothing, and Real Salt Lake scored the game-winner a minute later.
Sporting KC manager Peter Vermes WENT OFF in the postgame. Here’s that video, if you have a few minutes to watch a man dump all over MLS.
He called the misses “a travesty” and “unprofessional.”
He called it a pattern of his club losing on bad calls, wondered about a bias against small-market clubs and lamented Sporting’s partnership with MLS amid the pattern. He called the league out of touch and unwilling to fix an obvious problem.
Two more quotes:
“It is the black mark on this league. It is an example of why we lose so many people to watch this game, year in and year out, and game in and game out, because we do not get it right.”
And the knockout punch:
“I’m embarrassed today to be a part of the league when you can’t (get the call right).”
Now. Let’s talk.
You probably know where I stand on this. I believe that complaining about officiating is the ballad of the loser. I do not think anyone has ever won a game and credited officiating. Daniel Salloi and Cameron Duke missed chances. There is no guarantee Sporting would have made the penalty kick and the missed call didn’t force Sporting to allow the game-winner and et cetera and et cetera and et cetera.
But, I also get it.
And not just the emotions — Sporting would have been the top seed in the West with a win, and instead will be third — but a specific point Vermes made.
Go back to the black mark comment. The money line: “it is an example of why we lose so many people to watch this game.”
That, for me, is where the missed call and Vermes’ rant goes from ordinary frustration to existential threat. Because he’s right, and before we go too far down this specific path we should spend a paragraph recognizing an obvious truth:
Referees miss calls. In all sports. And I’m not just talking about Angel Hernandez. College basketball is about to start and there isn’t a worse-officiated sport in the country. Watch the NBA. Vermes complimented the NFL’s officiating processes, but I do not know anyone who follows that league and doesn’t think officiating needs to improve. So MLS is not alone here. Heck, watch the Premier League.
But, new paragraph, MLS is dogged by subpar officiating more than any other league. The NFL is bulletproof. The NBA has the best athletes in the world, and the officiating is sort of baked into part of the show. MLS doesn’t have the history and tradition and personal ties that help generate interest in college basketball.
The bar is higher for MLS, and instead of over-investing in the best officiating possible the league uses union-protected officials who literally nobody believes are good at their jobs. VAR is imperfect and comes with some frustrating unintended consequences, but we all deal with it because we know there are moments that the whole sport will feel like a charade if the wrong call is missed.
Well, the end of that Sporting game was that moment.
MLS is “protecting its own” in Vermes’ words, but I wish there was someone inside the league office to tell an uncomfortable truth, which is that the league has gotten much better in a lot of ways and is well-positioned for its next TV rights negotiations, but if it wants to be seriously considered among the world’s best leagues and not an elaborate game of third-tier dress-up, then it needs to prevent embarrassing moments like this and fully extinguish the ones that slip through the cracks.
We’ll talk more about this below, and plenty about the Chiefs. But I didn’t know how to start this week any other way.
This is the question that has defined the Chiefs’ season, and will continue to define the Chiefs’ season.
We can, have, and will again go through the specifics. There are a lot of problems that come and go, so that on any particular snap you can blame the play call, the receivers, the pocket, Mahomes’ pocket presence, Mahomes’ decision, Mahomes’ footwork, his timing, his accuracy, his anything.
You know my theory, which I believe now even more than when I wrote this. The short version is that Mahomes is hyper-aware of, sensitive to and motivated by his place in the league, and that the Super Bowl loss flipped it from him chasing Tom Brady as the GOAT to a host of young quarterbacks closing ground, and that Mahomes’ talent went from pressuring defenses to something closer to a burden of his own.
I believe the result is he’s overthinking, lost patience, and is sort of white-knuckling the bat on too many swings.
I understand it’s not that simple. His receivers aren’t getting open enough, and when they do they’re dropping too many of the passes that come their way. Anything that makes the walls close in on a quarterback can serve as a force-multiplier for the next problem.
But we spent so much time and energy deservedly dumping praise onto Mahomes as the Chiefs transformed from consistent playoff participant to evergreen championship threat that it’s only logical to draw the line with him and the offense struggling together.
The theories are wild, by the way. Some of you are blaming his family and even a baby. Some of you may or may not be under the impression that he films commercials in real-time. Why has nobody blamed taking snaps from a left-handed center?
Maybe?
The line moved something like 6 points when the news broke about Aaron Rodgers testing positive and, with hindsight, that wasn’t nearly enough.
Rodgers’ absence hung over everything. The Packers’ game plan appeared to be aimed at making the Chiefs cover the flats, but without the threat of Rodgers throwing downfield the Chiefs blitzed the bejeezus out of Love and he had no chance.
It’s just hard to know exactly how much of that was the Chiefs playing well, how much was the Packers playing poorly (outside of the quarterback) and how much was the difference between Rodgers and Love.
If you want to be optimistic you don’t have to squint too hard.
The Chiefs clearly won the defensive line of scrimmage for the second week in a row. Frank Clark has been Seattle Frank three weeks in a row, and Melvin Ingram brought some juice in his first game with the Chiefs. Chris Jones remains a problem at defensive tackle.
Winning ugly is a feature, not a flaw. There isn’t a team that’s ever been good enough for postseason success without finding ways to win at less than its best. In the championship year, that meant beating the Lions at the end despite three turnovers and beating the Chargers in Mexico City despite Mahomes not playing well and beating the 49ers in the Super Bowl despite not playing well for three quarters.
You can also zoom out a little here and see that the Chiefs could be tops in the AFC West on Sunday night with a win in Las Vegas and the right outcome between the Chargers and Vikings. The Chiefs have played poorly (by their standards) for more than half a season now and the rest of the league hasn’t been good enough to bury them.
What’s likelier: That the Chiefs will continue to play like the Jeff Fisher Rams for the rest of the season? Or that a team that’s been no worse than AFC runner-up the last three years and has a history of late-season surges will find its way into the playoffs and be nobody’s preferred matchup?
Especially when this is still a thing the Chiefs can do in the biggest moments:
This is just a really hard team to analyze, or get a feel for, because there have certainly been more frustrating moments than exhilarating ones. So nobody should pretend that one good play erases the problems, but there’s just so much that went into that one.
An incomplete list*:
* A list? A list!
- Andy Reid could have made a sober case for a handoff there. That’s third and 10, less than 2 minutes, the Packers out of timeouts. Run the ball for 2 yards, let 40 seconds run off the clock, punt and make Jordan Love go something like 90 yards in something like 65 seconds with no timeouts.
- Mahomes could have panicked at the rush. His pocket trust has been shaky, and the Packers brought five pass rushers. If he bailed too soon it wouldn’t have given Hill enough time.
- Mahomes could have misfired the pass. We’ve seen him make a thousand more difficult throws than that one, but on-the-run, against-the-body, through-a-tight-window throws should not be assumed.
- Hill had to make the catch. He has six drops this season.
All of those things went the Chiefs’ way. They talk a lot about maintaining confidence and, I have to be honest, I do not believe them. I think they know they can be good, but I also don’t believe that they believe they are good right now, and there’s a big difference.
I just wonder if that play will help draw something out of them.
Has to continue this weekend in Las Vegas, though.
They’re also a few plays from being 2-7. So maybe 5-4 is fair?
I’m not trying to jump on this question and make too much of it, but there have been times this season that it’s not clear the team accepts its current reality.
Comments in news conferences should always be filtered through a reasonable translator, and even then they are often just one specific version of reality. I also want to give the benefit of the doubt that what’s said publicly is often different than what’s said privately, and that news conferences — especially in the NFL — are often a team’s constructed way to message.
But I think it’s too late in the season for Mahomes to be saying it’s still early (like he did after the Giants win) or for Frank Clark to be blaming routine injuries (like he did after the Packers game).
The Chiefs are sort of the classic NBA team that can drift into the playoffs with more talent than execution, but nobody is winning in the playoffs without both.
And I don’t think any team should assume it can just wake up before the division round and tell the world its 11-6 record is a mirage because, poof, now they’re a championship team with championship focus because they just decided to do that.
This is hindsight, but I think about it often:
We’ve talked a lot about how Mahomes’ 20-0 stuff wasn’t really about the Chiefs going 20-0 on the scoreboard, but rather them developing consistent habits in practice and meetings and games that would bring out their best.
At the time, it seemed like a strange path to a common message, but now you have to assume Mahomes saw some real cracks last season even before the Super Bowl and was trying to use public messaging to help solve them.
It hasn’t gone the way the Chiefs wanted, but Mahomes was right to demand a more consistent focus and level of execution.
Plot twist: Now he needs to be part of that solution, too.
I don’t know that it’s completely disappeared, but part of the Chiefs overhaul of their offensive line was to get stronger and bigger.
Because everything in life is a tradeoff, that also means being less athletic in space. Put Eric Fisher and Orlando Brown in a three-cone drill and you’ll see a big difference, you know?
Reid is as good as anyone at designing screens, but he does need the athletes to run them effectively. This specific offensive line is much better going forward than sideways, so you’re seeing some screens, but you’re also seeing many more short-yardage snaps where the Chiefs are just trusting their linemen to push the grown men across from them backward.
You’ll still see snaps where Joe Thuney, Creed Humphrey and Trey Smith get to the second level and pancake linebackers. You’ll even see some of that in screens.
But Orlando Brown is very good at a specific skill and limited in others, and once you start moving guys around you risk a weakness making the wrong kind of difference.
I still believe the Chiefs are leaving money on the table by not throwing more to their backs in the flats, but that’s probably a discussion for another time.
No, but I did find myself in the wild situation of believing the Chiefs should run the ball more.
They ran the ball seven times on the opening touchdown drive. Here is the breakdown of the rest of their drives:
Three passes, no runs (punt).
Five passes, one run (punt).
One pass, two runs (punt).
Two passes, one run (field goal, short field).
Four passes, no runs (field goal, end of the half).
Three passes, no runs (punt).
Two passes, one run (punt, after the run gave them second and 3).
Four passes, five runs (punt).
Two passes, one run (punt).
Three passes, four runs (kneel down).
To review: The Chiefs needed seven more possessions before they matched the number of runs called on their first possession. And they were protecting a lead the whole time, and a two-score lead for most of the time.
There’s a reason this stuff matters. The more the Chiefs can run the ball, the more opportunities they’re going to have like this one:
Now, full disclosure, I don’t know what the Packers were thinking here. They showed two deep safeties before the snap, but then safety Adrian Amos came in after the snap to cover the flat. That meant Hill was one-on-one with a corner, and when he got a clean break at the line of scrimmage it was an easy decision for Mahomes.
Packers safety Darnell Savage does his best to come across from the other side of the field, and he may have bothered Hill a bit, but if the ball is better placed or a blink sooner the Chiefs have one of their biggest gains of the year — and perhaps a 95-yard touchdown.
Again: I don’t know why the Packers defended it that way. The Chiefs had not earned that kind of coverage. They had not shown an ability and willingness to stick with the run and short stuff, and certainly hadn’t been effective at much of anything. So the play should have been to keep everything in front.
It was a mistake, but defenses make mistakes.
The challenge for the Chiefs right now is to force more of those moments, and for Mahomes to make them matter.
He’s a star. He’s exactly the kind of mid-round pick that championship teams are built on — cheap labor, homegrown, with an intelligence and athleticism to create big moments.
This is as good as the position can be played, one-on-one with one of the game’s best receivers against a throw made to exploit the coverage:
I didn’t notice this in real time, and if I’m honest I didn’t see it on film, either. But after the game Sneed gave up a secret. He said that the Packers had a hand signal that he knew gave away that sort of faux rub-wheel route that Adams ran on the interception (and, later, Randall Cobb on a nice pass breakup by Sneed).
You can see some of these pieces start to come together for the Chiefs’ defense. The whole thing is predicated on pressure, and when that wasn’t happening early … woof. That’s when nobody looks good.
But they’re starting to win the line of scrimmage more convincingly and more consistently, which is going to mean more opportunities on the back end for Sneed, Tyrann Mathieu and Juan Thornhill*.
* Who, just being honest, had a sort of Dan Sorensen moment where he got caught lost one-on-one and gave up a long completion.
Melvin Ingram had four pressures in 21 pass-rush snaps, according to Pro Football Focus, and I thought the first was particularly indicative of what the Chiefs think they added:
See how he takes control of right tackle Billy Turner from the jump, pushing him back until it’s time to shed and get to Love?
Ingram may not be as explosive as he was when he was 27, but he still has all the tools in the bag. This isn’t a guy that tackles can have the same approach with snap to snap. He can do different things and pick his moments to have the biggest impact.
And that’s how this thing has to work — the guys up front getting to the quarterback and creating opportunities for the guys in the back to make big plays.
Doing it against Jordan Love in his first start is one thing.
Doing it against Derek Carr on Sunday Night Football would be a powerful statement.
OK, let’s move on.
Back to Sporting.
Maybe.
I meant everything I said at the top. Sometimes people in power need to hear difficult truths, and after they fine Vermes — and he had to know what he was doing, and hope he got his money’s worth — some folks in the commissioner’s office need to do some honest inventorying.
The concerning part is that coaches don’t typically go nuclear like this without some prior missiles fired in private, so if that’s what happened here you can’t be sure that this is the message MLS will hear without others around the league offering similar critiques.
But all of those thoughts are in a separate bucket from what you’re asking. Those thoughts are about the league and how it can be the best version of itself.
I think what you’re asking is whether this is good for the team.
And that … I’m less sure.
This can go one of two ways. This can be a (legitimate, at least as far as these things go) us-against-the-world moment with Vermes helping to turn the disappointment and deflation of an ending like that into a fire that burns through the postseason.
That’s one option.
But here’s another: The team has an excuse now, or at least some alternative reality that they’re going to be thinking about. The loss amplifies a late-season fade (three straight losses) and lets the team think that VAR shut them out of the No. 1 seed when in reality a win in either of the previous two games would have made the whole thing moot.
Look, Vermes obviously knows a lot more about this than me, both generally and in how it may or may not affect his team.
But he’s also a famously emotional and confrontational man, so he may have just been speaking from his heart.
I hear you. There has been this steady talking point around Sporting that this could be the best team the franchise has ever had.
That’s the kind of impossible-to-answer debate that makes sports so fun, but the point is a lot of you expected more than this, and I’m not sure the gap between the No. 3 seed and what Sporting thought it was didn’t fuel some of Vermes’ rant.
But I’d also remind you that Alan Pulido and Johnny Russel did not play on Sunday.
That matters.
A lot.
Vermes does not seem concerned about their availability for the playoffs, and while you’d rather not be working guys back from injuries in the postseason, the point is that the team that will open the MLS playoffs is different than the one that closed the MLS regular season.
A bye in the first round would have been swell. We can understand the disappointment, and the righteousness.
But everything that Sporting wanted is still there. Still possible.
They get a home match against a team they previously beat 3-0 at home*. SKC has excelled at home, and Vancouver has struggled on the road. Sporting should have its A-lineup on the field. No excuses.
* Although that was in May, and the Whitecaps beat SKC 2-1 in Vancouver in October.
We’ll see.
I know that one of the questions fans have about Royals chairman John Sherman is about the payroll.
Before the 2020 season, Sal Perez signed the biggest contract in franchise history, with $82 million in new money. That’s significant, but we haven’t seen a real turn through free agency.
It does not seem like the Royals will be aggressive in the market this offseason, but that’s more of a function of the particulars of their roster than anything else. The Royals have incumbents or intriguing prospects (or both) at every position, with enough versatility to think they can fill most injuries or slumps that come in every baseball season.
The biggest question was going to be centerfield, but then the Royals signed Michael A. Taylor to a two-year extension just before the end of the regular season.
The farm system was ranked third in baseball by Baseball America in August. Those graduations have begun in the last few years, but the Royals still have Bobby Witt Jr., Nick Pratto, M.J. Melendez, Asa Lacy, Austin Cox, Alec Marsh and others. Kyle Isbel, Angel Zerpa, Jackson Kowar, Jon Heasley and Dylan Coleman are among those who debuted in 2021 and should get more opportunities in the future.
That doesn’t mean the Royals shouldn’t spend. But it does mean that a prudent strategy might be to see where the market goes, pluck any bargains or fits, and then give as many opportunities as possible to the guys in-house to know where the money should be spent in the future.
Maybe I’m reading the question wrong, but I think you’re trying to get an idea about how wiling this ownership group will be to spend.
We don’t know yet, but every indication available so far is that they’re ready to invest.
Well, I want to make two points here.
The first is that schools are the NCAA. And the NCAA is the schools. Technically, the schools write the legislation and decide on the priorities, but even if you’re like me and see the NCAA as this sort of manufactured bureaucratic protection meant to deflect the hardest questions away from the schools, you have to acknowledge that this reality was deliberately created by the schools.
Now, the second point is that I don’t think the NCAA will exist much longer. We talked some about this on the podcast last week, but the truth is the NCAA already does not exist in the way it had for so long.
NIL rights have changed everything. Transfer rules are loosened. There is generally much less public appetite for the sort of hall monitor existence the NCAA has had for so long.
The NCAA is in the midst of a major reorganization and just this week finalized an early draft of a new constitution.
The short version is that most rules and enforcement would no longer come from the central office, but instead be delegated to the three divisions and the leagues that make them up.
This is, generally, the direction most in college sports have been expecting. The upshot is that the rules and enforcement for the top end of Division I — and you better believe that Ohio State, Alabama and USC are going to have a lot more to do with the new direction than anyone in the Sun Belt — is going to be much different than Divisions II and III.
Division I rules and enforcement might actually be something closer to the pro leagues they’ve long emulated than anything in the lower divisions. But we’ll see about all that.
The point here is that your question is smart, and timely, because schools are realizing that what’s been status quo for so long is not tenable in the new world.
College sports is moving the way college sports often does — slower than it should, and awkwardly — but we’re in the midst of a transformation. There will be more clunkiness, and more unintended consequences. There will be moments when some of us long for the current reality.
But things are changing, and quickly.
The NCAA as a lot of us have come to know it is dying.
Sunglasses is a tremendous call and, well, look. This is weird because I don’t push product and they’re certainly not paying me, but I just ordered a couple more pair to replace a couple more lost pair, and I have to say: These are very comfortable, light and $25. Recommend.
The other one that comes to mind is clothes, and this is probably one of the many spots where I need to listen to my wife more. Her strategy is to not spend often, but that when you spend you get what you want, regardless of price or sale.
The result is she doesn’t have a ton of clothes, but all the stuff she has, she likes. It all looks good.
For some reason, I have this mental block about buying clothes. I think of it as selfish, like every dollar I spend on a shirt is a dollar that we can’t go out with as a family, or that I can’t use for something for the kids or my wife.
I’d love to present that as selfless, but the truth is the result is often that I come downstairs ready to take my wife out and she looks at the stupid shoes I’m pretending to like because they were $20 less than the ones I should have bought.
The problem is I don’t really care a lot about clothes and, in fact, feel uncomfortable in expensive stuff. I’d also point out that cheap clothes often look great online or even on the rack before you have to wash them and all that. I’m too old to still be fooled by this stuff, but I’m just a flawed man standing in front of you being honest.
I need to just let her buy all my stuff. This is something I should have started doing years ago and, actually, please don’t tell her I said any of this because she’ll roll her eyes and say I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL HIM THIS FOREVER BUT HE KEEPS INSISTING ON DRESSING LIKE HE’S A HIGH SCHOOL JUNIOR.
So, really. I’m asking you not to say anything to her for my sake, but also for yours.
This week I’m particularly grateful for the timer on the coffee maker. Coming downstairs to a freshly brewed pot feels like a cross between making it as a Real Adult and maybe a little like an episode of The Jetsons. It’s like a robot made me coffee. Thank you, robot.