Andre Luis — that’s Andre Luis Garcia, not any of the eight other Brazilian soccer players that go by Andre Luis — is dangerously imbalanced and plays for Brazilian squad Botafogo.  Earlier this year he was actually arrested on the field of play, so I suppose we should actually applaud his restraint for his reaction to this yellow card.  I mean, he didn’t even technically assault the referee.  Those anger management classes must be paying off.

Also, for those of you who are sexually adventurous, please be advised that “Botafogo” is illegal in 37 states.

[Deuce of Davenport]

To supplement the video of South Carolina’s Stephen Garcia getting tackled by the umpire on Saturday, here’s footage from a 2007 high school football game in which one player doesn’t stop at the whistle — and he gets a righteous clothesline from the ref for his trouble.

I like this development in football, but I want to see the refs be more subtly disruptive.  Have the side judge trip a wide-open receiver on a deep route, throw flags directly into players’ face masks, needlessly penalize the team’s most volatile player for unsportsmanlike conduct — y’know, football could really benefit if it were more like a prison game, with the corrections officers serving as refs.  If only to increase the number of on-field stabbings.

[Hot Clicks]

As you’ve no doubt seen by now, Gamecocks quarterback Stephen Garcia (this guy) was stopped on a quarterback draw in the red zone by umpire Wilbur Hackett Jr during LSU’s 24-17 victory on Saturday.  While it certainly looks like Hackett leans into Garcia with a shoulder to drop him after a four-yard gain, SEC officials claim otherwise:

“The umpire’s most vulnerable position on the field is right behind the line of scrimmage and sometimes gets right into the play. In this case, the umpire is there, he tries to defend himself by putting his arms up. The quarterback shifts direction a little bit and he puts his arms up.

“He makes an attempt to defend himself. I know it may look different on video, but what we see is that he makes an effort to protect himself.”

That’s a good call. I like the way he steps into it and initiates contact to protect himself. Why, if he tried to sidestep Garcia and get out of the way, he couldn’t have defended himself while he wasn’t getting in the way of the play.

Ah, bootleg video of unknown mixed martial arts bouts. It’s gonna be a good day, for sure.

I’ll walk you through this clip, since at first watching it makes as much sense as Cloverfield. The first 30 seconds is just fighting that ends in a nice little knockout with a kick to the face, then you’ve got 30 seconds of celebration, then you have to pay attention. (I know: I’m sorry.) The losing fighter’s corner man grabs the referee’s wrists, and the ref delivers a straight left that drops him like a sack of potatoes. After that there’s just a bunch of pointless bullshit, with people running around and freaking out while the camera shakes. Hey, just like Cloverfield!

[Lt. Winslow]

Ed Hochuli’s inadvertent whistle that negated a Jay Cutler fumble at the end of Sunday’s Chargers-Broncos barnburner gave Denver the extra chance it needed to win the game, and as pissed off as San Diego fans are, no one feels as badly about it as Hochuli.

“He’s devastated,” said Mike Pereira, the NFL’s supervisor of officials. “… I was talking to Ed within 10 minutes after the game was over, and he was sick. He’s still sick (yesterday). [...]

Most remarkably, posts on various Internet forums indicated Hochuli replied to hundreds of e-mails from fans Monday. In those e-mails, he apologized for his mistake.  One such e-mail… read:

I’m getting hundreds of emails – hate mail – but I’m responding to it all. People deserve a response.

You can rest assured that nothing anyone can say can make me feel worse than I already feel about my mistake on the fumble play. [...] Affecting the outcome of a game is a devastating feeling. Officials strive for perfection – I failed miserably. Although it does no good to say it, I am very, very sorry.

I’ve found that a nice way to say sorry is flowers.  Flowers and oral sex.  If he really wants to make it up to San Diego, he should probably clear his schedule this week.

[Shutdown Corner; image source]

Nobody at Slate knows anything about anything, much less sports, but that doesn’t stop them from writing woolly-headed articles about it.  The most recent long-winded screed accomplishing nothing is about the fallibility of human referees, and why sports should consider more computerized judges.  Or not.  It’s hard to tell if there’s a point or not, because it’s Slate.

More specifically, the author is enamored with tennis’s Hawk-Eye system that allows for challenges to umpires’ calls.  So why don’t we do that for ALL SPORTS?

Computers… are free of hate and idiosyncrasies. So why don’t we move to the tennis model, letting a computer be the ultimate decision-maker? Sure, I’m making a slippery-slope argument, and it may seem far-fetched to think that baseball or any other team sport will let machines analyze, rather than just record, what happens on the field.

“Hey, this is ridiculous, but why don’t I write a long boring article about it anyway?  I’m getting paid by the word.  Look at me, I can perform useless thought experiments that go nowhere.”

What I’m saying is, I’d rather starve than write something for Slate.