NFL refs are insulted over 100 officials gave the Chiefs such an astounding dynasty assist

The last thing the NFL wanted was more fuel for the fire that is the conspiracy theory claiming that the league rigs its officiating in favor of the Kansas City Chiefs. But that's exactly what it got during the AFC Championship Game, with multiple controversial calls breaking K.C.'s way and helping to determine the outcome of a tight win over the Buffalo Bills.

While a healthy portion of the country will approach the upcoming Super Bowl showdown between the Philadelphia Eagles from a place of assuming that, somehow or some way, Patrick Mahomes and Co. will get the breaks they need, the league would rather talk about anything but. So, with the football world (and tons of global media) descended on New Orleans this week, they decided to break out the big guns in an attempt to win the PR war.

NFL Referees Association executive director Scott Green released a blistering statement on Tuesday afternoon, decrying the loose talk of rigged games and claiming that it's "insulting and preposterous to hear conspiracy theories that somehow 17 officiating crews consisting of 138 officials are colluding to assist one team".

Which, to be clear, is the truth. The NFL is too vast and varied an organization to pull something like this off, much less to keep it quiet for years on end, and the calls in the AFC title game in particular are more than ambiguous enough to fall within the grey area of officials making judgment calls. There's no legitimate reason to think that the league tilts things in favor of Kansas City, and you can understand why referees would be offended by the notion that they're bought and paid for.

Unfortunately for both them and the league, however, no amount of indignant statements are going to make this go away. Because for as much as the powers that be can stamp their feet and shout otherwise, the reality remains the same: The Chiefs just keep on winning, and without any sort of ulterior motive at play, they really have gotten an awfully friendly whistle.

NFL tries to nip Chiefs conspiracy theory in the bud, but the numbers don't lie

Of course no one has any actual reason to believe that the NFL is rigged. But after two straight titles and with another one potentially coming with a win on Sunday, most of the country is simply tired of watching Mahomes and the Chiefs win all the time. They want a scapegoat for that, someone to blame, and it just so happens that there's a ready-made one available: the fact that Kansas City has benefitted from officiating during its playoff runs, as a recent study empirically proved.

Again, none of which means that the fix is in. Good teams commit fewer penalties, and the Chiefs have the benefit of some of the very best coaching in the league (and, in Mahomes and others, some of its smartest players). But when a team wins so much as to seem more or less inevitable, backlash is bound to come. And the NFL isn't helping matters when it really is true that Kansas City gets the calls at a rate substantially higher than its opponents. If the league wants this all to go away, that's the place to start, as is an Eagles win on Sunday.