RandBall: As championship dreams faded Sunday, the blame game took over

Sports referees are the perfect enemy for our time. They wield large amounts of power yet operate in relative anonymity. They are mistake-prone humans enforcing defined but often squishy rules and are instructed to do so in equal measure to each side of a competition — leaving themselves vulnerable to anger from all involved parties.

They are the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to complaining about an outcome of a close game, and that’s what bothered me the most about Cheryl Reeve’s postgame lambasting of officials after Sunday’s Game 5 loss to New York in the WNBA Finals.

She can be right that they botched the final possession that sent the game to overtime — plenty of us at home, myself included, thought the shooting foul should have been overturned — without turning it into a conspiracy theory-level travesty.

Patrick Reusse and I talked about that on Monday’s Daily Delivery podcast.

We live in an era where grievance is more fashionable than accountability and groupthink is more desired than nuanced discussion.

As Jim Souhan noted in a lengthier piece about Reeve’s postgame reaction, New York was similarly aggrieved after Game 4 when the Lynx shot 20 free throws to the Liberty’s nine and won the game on a debatable foul in an otherwise rugged game with two seconds left.

But fans, players and coaches quickly develop amnesia about the breaks that went their way and never forget the perceived slights against them.

Such bitterness is usually the domain of long-suffering Vikings fans, many of whom have a disturbing mental catalog of all the times the purple have been wronged by officials over the years.

Perhaps that’s what made Sunday’s 31-29 loss to the Lions refreshing.

Sure, there were multiple reasons the Vikings not only fell from the ranks of the undefeated but more often than not looked like the second-best team on the field.

But they were related almost entirely for tangible things that happened on the field.

After jumping to a 10-0 lead, the Vikings surrendered touchdowns on four consecutive Detroit possessions in the middle of the game. Brian Flores’ scheme just doesn’t faze the Lions.

The offense did very little during that time to turn momentum back the other way, leading to criticism of the interior of the offensive line, Kevin O’Connell’s play calling and QB Sam Darnold’s ability to execute those calls.

When a splendid scoop-and-score restored a one-point lead with six minutes left, the Vikings made three critical errors: A two-point conversion try wasn’t even close; a chance to seal the game with a couple first downs went awry when a Darnold third down pass sailed over both a strangely positioned Jordan Addison and Justin Jefferson. And then the defense couldn’t make the one critical stop in previous weeks, allowing the Lions to kick the game-winning field goal.

There was plenty of blame to go around, but very little for the officiating. It was all saved up for Sunday night, it seems.