For those of you that have completely blocked and/or repressed Super Bowl Xtra Large from your memories, the NFL has found a way to re-open that wound. They've assigned Bill Leavy, the official that blew several extremely important calls in the Seahawks Super Bowl loss to Pittsburgh in 2005, to officiate next Sunday's game at Heinz Field.
This thing just won't die.
It was bad enough that it happened in the first place. The phantom holding call against Sean Locklear that negated a big gain that would have put Seattle at the 1 yard line. The mind-numbing and shockingly-absurd 'chop-blocking' call on a play where Matt Hasselbeck MADE A TACKLE. How can you chop BLOCK a guy when you're TACKLING HIM???!!! DOESN'T ANYONE NOTICE THIS?? I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS.
The officiating was so bad, a popular Halloween costume was born (ok, couldn't find an image but several of my friends wore something to this effect).
Leavy finally went on record last year when he brought up the game, and had this to say: "It was a tough thing for me. I kicked two calls in the fourth quarter and I impacted the game, and as an official you never want to do that. It left me with a lot of sleepless nights, and I think about it constantly. I'll go to my grave wishing that I'd been better."
Great, now I feel bad.
On one hand, as Danny O'Neil pointed out, if you refused to assign a ref to a game between teams where the guilty party has made a poor call in the past, you'd have no one left to assign. On the other hand, this was the Super Bowl, and arguably one of the most notorious and terribly-officiated games in recent history.
Oh well.