Leading Off: A Fiasco to End the Referee Fiasco? To be sure, the conga line of complaining about the replacement referee fiasco had started before Monday night's N.F.L. game got even ESPN's Jon "Everyone's Doing a Great Job!" Gruden all riled up. The line was headed right to the gilded -- and now probably fortified -- door of Commissioner Roger Goodell, whose baronial arrogance makes him so easy to blame for just about anything. But the ending to that dreadful game Monday night may be his crowning achievement. Because after his underqualified, undertrained, shouldn't-be-anywhere-near-an-N.F.L.-field referees made such a complete hash of the end of the Packers-Seahawks game, the conga line is now more like an angry mob. Yes, the ill-fated touchdown/interception/pass interference that gave the Seahawks a victory happened in Seattle, but the fingers pointed immediately to the gilded door in New York. This is Goodell's referee lockout, and he has to fix it, with Bill Reiter leading that cry on Foxsports.com, who calls it the latest running rebuke of Goodell's leadership. A public apology by Goodell is in order too, adds Dan Wetzel on Yahoo.com. Twitter's universe rendered a quick and nasty judgment, maybe even angrier than the Packers' locker room. And the television analysts lined up to out-outrage one another, as Patrick Rishe describes on Forbes.com, the N.F.L. losing dignity with every howl. The weekend's games were bad enough to get Charles P. Pierce calling it a disaster on Grantland.com, with Michael Rosenberg of SI.com teeing off on the Baltimore-New England game alone. Peter King of SI.com had more examples, and explained that even the referee supervisors in the replay booths were adding to the chaos, which came into play in Monday night's ridiculousness, too. That final call not only helped the Seahawks, but if it spells the end of this lockout, writes Steve Kelly in The Seattle Times, then it helps the whole league. If anything, this latest calamity paints Goodell as the corporate chief emblematic of our times, another one tilting his universe even further in the corporation's favor. The referee lockout, like the player one a year ago, is trying to rid the N.F.L. of those pesky financial commitments it finds unnecessary. The people who clean the league offices should soon expect certified letters telling them they will soon be paid in autographed pictures of Goodell because basking in the league's reflective glory should be enough wages. Perhaps the happiest people on earth about all this are those leading a dreadful N.H.L. lockout because their fiasco will fall well behind the N.F.L.'s on the scorn meter. The Texas Rangers' Josh Hamilton might be happy that fewer people read about his latest addition (too much caffeine) to the stupid baseball injury list. Even Patriots Coach Bill Belichick is getting let off the hook a bit, this now overshadowing his referee-shaking incident and the fact that his team isn't very good, writes Gerry Callahan in The Boston Herald. For now, all anyone will care about is the N.F.L. referee debacle. The league ordered this up. And now the mob is headed up Park Avenue, to test the soundproofing of Goodell's gilded door.