It Seems Like Every Sunday Is Flag Day

Helping NFL officials do their jobs isn’t a high priority for most football fans, but the good people of Pittsburgh could lend a hand this week.

It would be awfully charitable of them to ship their yellow Terrible Towels to Tampa, where the Buccaneers will play host to the Miami Dolphins. The officials are sure to run out of flags.

After all, the Dolphins set a record last Sunday with a staggering 18 penalties in their loss at Buffalo. And the Buccaneers have 53 penalties this season, the most of any NFC team.

In its flag-ridden loss to the New York Jets, Tampa Bay not only gave the league a black eye, but gave one to umpire Butch Hannah. He was a recipient of an inadvertent punch in the eye by Buccaneer cornerback Ronde Barber, who accidentally struck Hannah during a scuffle. The league could buy quite a few frozen steaks to put on that shiner with the $30,000 fine it collected from Barber this week.

Come to think of it, there probably will be a flag shortage in Baltimore too. In their loss at Detroit on Sunday, the Ravens were penalized 21 times -- one shy of an NFL record -- with two ejections. They more than matched the combined Monday night total of 20 by the Steelers and Chargers, who seemed to be flagged on every other play.

In the aftermath, the NFL doled out $15,000 fines to Ravens Terrell Suggs and Ed Reed. Suggs, who was ejected for intentionally bumping an official, later apologized for his behavior. Reed, who was fined for grabbing an official by the shoulder after an extra-point attempt, expressed no remorse after learning of the fine.

“Things happened the way they happened,” Reed told reporters this week. “You’re not going to go back and say, ‘I regret doing this and doing that’ because you don’t. But at the same time, you have to learn from it.”

It remains to be seen how much the Ravens have actually learned. Their latest meltdown could be an anomaly, seeing as they had as many penalties Sunday as they did in their first three games. But it also could be the product of frustration for an underachieving team that for years has required its defense to carry a disproportionate share of the load.

Baltimore Coach Brian Billick said it’s his responsibility to “dog-cuss” his players when necessary, just as he praises them when they’re deserving. He said he knows “egregious” mistakes were made, “but I believe in the character of these guys, and I’ll stick by that character and support them to the end.”

Even Cincinnati (4-1), off to its best start in more than a decade, can’t avoid the zebras’ wrath. A season after the Bengals finished with the seventh-fewest flags in the league, they’ve collected a league-high 57 through five games.

Heading into last weekend’s whistle-fest, according to STATS LLC, there had been more penalties through the first four games of this season, 926, than in any other season since 1972. The runners-up were 2003 with 902 penalties, 2004 with 861, and 2002 with 809.

That, I suppose, makes this the penitentiary century.

But the season is still young, and it’s too early to tell if this year’s torrent of whistle stops is just a statistical fluke or a more troubling trend. That’s what Rich McKay said, at least. He not only runs the Atlanta Falcons but he’s co-chair of the competition committee, which monitors scoring, rules changes, penalties and the like.

“Let’s let the book be written before we make any sweeping judgments,” he said. “If we look after Week 8 or 10, we’ll probably have a better feel.”

Still, McKay acknowledged there’s meaning behind the fact that penalties generally have been on the rise during the past five years. He said the most substantial increase has been in false-start penalties. Why? There are no firm answers, but the competition committee has all but ruled out stadium noise as the main factor, because there isn’t a significant difference in how many times teams have been flagged for it at home vs. on the road.

Maybe the most surprising thing about last weekend’s penalty-palooza was not how many flags there were, but who didn’t draw a single whistle: the Raiders.

Then again, they had the week off.

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Terrell Owens doesn’t operate under the radar, but he sure knows how to get under people’s skin.

After Philadelphia’s 33-10 loss at Dallas last Sunday, the star Eagle receiver made his way to the bus wearing, of all things, a Michael Irvin jersey.

Now, the Eagle-Cowboy rivalry might be the nastiest in sports. So for Owens to pull on Dallas colors is pretty much the worst thing he could do in the eyes of Philadelphia fans.

But Irvin got a kick out of it.

“It’s saying, ‘I’m a fan of this person,’ ” said Irvin, the former All-Pro receiver turned ESPN analyst. “I’m flattered by it.”

Even so, Irvin said Owens packed the jersey thinking the Eagles were going to win, just so he could emerge from the locker room and “rub it in the faces” of Cowboy fans. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

“It would be like me, after we lost a playoff game at San Francisco, walking out with a Dwight Clark ‘the Catch’ shirt,” Irvin said. “People in Dallas would probably have been pretty upset about that. I would have gotten some flak for that. Luckily for me, we wore suits back home.”