"fans"???? Damn straight Rice fumbled which makes the ending irrelevant. And yes, true fans do gripe about that sort of thing.
Absolutely.
Some people like to say "refs bad calls tend to even out"..... oh really? Do they? Over time? Over 25 years maybe. But in one game, they often do not.
Ask Charles Woodson and his 2001-02 Raiders who had their playoff game taken away when they invented the Brady Tuck Rule.
Ask Seahawk fans when the refs screwed them versus Pittsburgh in that Super Bowl 5 years ago when Big Ben had a 30 passing rating, but got 2 huge bad calls from the zebras.
And last year's loss in Chicago week 3, the refs were the #1 star of the game by far.
I still have it on DVR and they screwed us directly on Hester's PR touchdown, on Finley's TD that was taken away, and they had 2 touchy calls on us on game-changing Ints of Cutler. One the call on Zombo and the other on Burnett.
Anyway, about the Jerry Rice one in the game Young-to Owens killed us: Obviously that was a horrible, fatal miss by the zebras.
We had no chance to win anyway that year (1998) because Wolf passed on Randy Moss. The Vikings were light-years better than us that year.
But what's funny is I remember a few years ago a Packer game on NFL Network in Green Bay, before the game the crew was on the field doing their pre-game. Mariucci was one of them.
I could hear about 100 fans behind them in the bleachers there chanting "Jerry Rice fumbled. Jerry Rice fumbled. Jerry Rice fumbled". This was about 10 years after the game! Cracked me up so much.
Great fans never forget.