It's a fact of life - a "given" - that our team will always have play against a constant head-wind in the form of unfavorable calls. It's a handicap no different than the minus-three points when you don't have home-field advantage.
Whining about it won't change anything. We just have to find a way to play-thru it and raise the bar high enough so that we consistently overcome bogus calls and win anyway.
Whether or not Wiz publically ******* about this won't change a thing. (Admittedly, it might make him and us feel better and perhaps score "leadership brownie points" for standing up for his players; but, from the coach's perspective, it might have precisely the opposite impact - namely, it might give players an excuse to fall back on).
(Note - This is not to say that Michael B and Rod G shouldn't be raising all kinds of hell behind the scenes and thru appropriate channels to make the playing-field a little less tilted).
A few other points worth making:
- Calais' comment that the team was probably "distracted" by the bogus call on the Cruz fumble is another way of saying that the team "lacks mental toughness" by allowing itself to be rattled by a bum call. (Don't great teams fight back rather than "get distracted")?
- After the final Giant TD, we got the ball back for more than 2-minutes, but couldn't do anything with it. The Giants made a couple of plays at crunch time. We didn't. (Mental toughness)?
- Is mental toughness inborn? Or can it be learned? (Or can it be passed thru to the players via good coaching leadership and preparation)?
- How long are we going to have to wait for our young CB's (and veteran safeties). to learn how not to let receivers get behind them deep for long gains?
- We were penalized 11 times. Kolb was sacked 4 times. Our DB's gave up 2 deep TD's (again!) late in the game. Plenty of wrong things likely to cause us to lose - bum call or not.
- On the brighter side, our running game got untracked and we played well enough to beat a physically tough NFC East foe.
- It's important that all the good effort by our players gets validated by Wins; lest they lose heart. Besides Seattle, we haven't played anyone in the NFC West and there's still time to turn things around. (It's that time of year when there are always 3 or 4 teams you count out, but who then put together a nice little mini-streak and somehow reach the playoffs. No reason we can't be one of them. The tragedy would be if the team collectively gave up and missed out on legitimate opportunities to turn things around).
- Each player has to figure out what specific things (most of them small) he needs to do to make the team good enough to win games we've been losing.
