If the refs aren’t overwhelmingly biased against the Saints, please explain this:
Actually its not, many members of SR think the rest of us are conspiracy theorists or cry babies making excuses.
You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you...
There is a debate as to how "conspiracy theory" became the "go to" way of trying to discredit arguments that more is going on than meets the eye:
https://sports.yahoo.com/theres-conspiracy-theory-cia-invented-152445087.html
Whether you want to say that the CIA "invented" the term or it's use to discredit critical thinking beyond media-approved simplified "narratives", to me the interesting thing is the term took off with the Kennedy assassination and dissatisfaction with the official explanations put forth. At that time the US had a permanent secret intelligence agency with a large secret budget (to be spent on secret conspiracies) for only about 15 years. You can read all the accounts of all the shenanigans the CIA has been up to much of which emerged in the 1970s, and continue.
As people are aware there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes and that sometimes conspiracies are real, of course you try to fill in the blanks with a "qui bouno" line of thinking. You can casually Google historical conspiracies that were real and documented. Has human nature changed so much that we would think powerful people would no longer conspire to rig something?
Anyway, I don't want to really hijack with politics but to illustrate the point...the CIA and the intelligence agencies of almost every other major country are spending probably around a trillion dollars a year to secretly lie, cheat and steal to influence politics, events and public perception of events. CIA secret budget is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars then throw in China, Mossad, Russia, European nations etc and add it all up. At any given time all around you are events that are being manipulated and channeled by competing forces. So of course conspiracies are real and media is used to set a narrative to obscure any connection of the dots as to who or what forces and agendas are behind the scenes trying to shove things one way or another.
To bring this back to the football point, of course NFL uses the same media scripts to set narratives around events in the league to keep the story away from, say, reforming officiating, which the technology and approaches are available to do. There is no reason to not have officiating be as effective as college football. Sometimes NCAA refs get it wrong but overall officiating is far superior and mostly gets it right and rarely to I watch a college game and get the feeling the refs are taking over or trying to keep it close.
So when you think of a powerful profit making media corporation like the NFL, and you want to assume they have integrity, you wonder why they don't invest some of all the money swimming in into next generation officiating to build confidence in the product. When you see how they resist it and how they treated PI review, then you ask the questions around "why?". And it at this point I am gladly called a conspiracy theorist because if you don't want to make the product as best as it can be and eliminate bias or flat out human error on the judgment calls I have to assume there is a reason you won't even consider it, and one of the reasons as we have discussed is that officiating is your best tool to influence the game outcomes and/or punish certain teams or individuals.
The way you set up the mechanisms to influence and channel the way refs call the games are outlined very well in bclemms post.
So call me a conspiracy theorist, thank you.