Tom Brady can’t watch the NFL’s penalty fest

Tom Brady takes to Twitter to criticize the NFL’s officiating during Thursday Night Football.

This week, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Tennessee Titans kicked off Week 3 of the NFL season on Thursday Night Football. Like many of us, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was watching the game. But during the second quarter, he claimed to have turned the game off, tweeting about his annoyance with the NFL’s officiating.

NFL officiating has been a controversy this season, as it seems to every year. During the week, Hall of Fame quarterback and Fox Sports announcer Troy Aikman spoke to Jimmy Traina on the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast about his irritation.

“The volume of penalties, it just ruins the flow of a game,” Aikman said. “It ruins the flow of a broadcast. Every single time after a play when you’re starting to talk about something, then you got to stop and everything comes to a halt because you got to hear what the officials are calling, what the penalty is and how it’s being administered… There are very few games where I’m not just totally, I guess, disturbed, is the right way to say it, with the number of penalties that come out.”

622 flags were thrown in the first two weeks of the 2019-20 season, an average of 9.72 per team per game. Last season, the average was 7.88. Ten years ago, the average was 6.93.

“I don’t know how they correct it,” Aikman said. “Because I think in a lot of ways it’s hard to go backward.”