I'm not sure it's an actual conspiracy against the Seahawks, unless it's like Scotte said and they are watching our secondary more than others. What else explains how we're trotting out the exact same secondary last year, but allowing significantly more passing yardage per game ? Now, I can see folks saying "well, hey, they changed the rules" but there are a few teams allowing 20-30 yards more passing per game than our defense did last year at a historic rate. So, they're letting SOME defenses play like that, but not ours.
The best explanation is like a few people said: the league is trying to keep prime time games close. You honestly can't even hide it when looking at that Redskins game. They were calling back any TD they could, and that call against Carpenter was atrocious and called out by EVERY analyst on every network as being a poor call. I didn't think the officiating was that bad, right up until the 3rd quarter and you could just see the flags coming out. Looking at the ebb and flow of the game, you could really see the Niners start to get buried in the mid 3rd quarter and gosh golly gee look, here come the flags to even things up.
Don't get me wrong. We commit more boneheaded and stupid penalties than ANY team in the league. The Raiders play a clean game by comparison. Pete's teams, even USC, have always been a bit sloppy. I think he allows some of it because he feels that being ultra aggressive is a more than fair trade off, but I also believe that his problems with personnel in NE are haunting him a bit (If anyone doesn't know, he had players going up the back stairs to upper mgmt.'s office and back door'ing him). I think he's a bit hesitant to totally rip a guy, and that's not his style anyways.
How many times is Bennett going to get offsides calls this year? He has to be close to leading the league. At this stage of his career, how hard is it to just watch the ball? Irvin's made some boneheaded mistakes, but he's also a young player. He's learning and I see him cleaning his game up quite a bit.
Then there are the obviously bad calls, and I honestly can't say whether it's just pure incompetence by the refs, or bias against us. I've counted 4 ridiculously easy false start calls missed (really ?!), one of which was seriously called an offsides by us when not a Seahawk even flinched and the OLman obviously jumped first. AZ's RB started early, and the defense was pointing it out, and still no call. Lynch's taunting call was another one; the Niners player literally pushed Lynch after pushing him around out of bounds, Lynch took exception to it....Seahawk gets flagged. The offsetting personal foul penalties: I'm going to say this...if you can't even figure out what number the guy was, it couldn't have been that egregious. The Turbin offensive PI call was probably the worst: Turbin was pushing HIS guy, not the guy covering Richardson. That guy got caught over the top. Terrible.
