Some years ago, preparing a TV story about the business generated by the Super Bowl, I received an angry phone call from a woman at CBS Sports. Despite the fact that my business channel was part owned by CBS which was televising the game, the woman on the other end of the phone was downloading her anger after being called on the carpet by some league snitch who asked had CBS Market Watch obtained written permission to use that years’ Super Bowl logo and paid a rights fee to use about ten seconds of file film in a story about Vince Lombardi and Super Bowl One.

That convinced me the league was the CIA/Nazi Germany and Secret Service of American Sports. If their tentacles could reach out to slap a business channel broadcasting a favorable story, how much control must they have over players, officials, and the rest of the media.

Commissioner Roger Goodell has reacted swiftly and often harshly to discipline players, and in the case of the New Orleans Saint, a coaching staff alleged to have put out a bounty system for the most vicious hits on opposing players.

But as controlling, organized and uber marketed as the NFL is, this season there’s a sense that Goodell and Company are losing control. First, the dispute that led to the Joes replacing the pros in the striped suits doesn’t seem that tough to resolve. The league wants the right to bench sub par officials which, after the last few weeks, most can understand, and they want to replace the current pension plan with a less costly 401 k plan.

Given that the NFL is a mammoth 10 billion dollar enterprise, that pitches its product 7 months a year around the world on 4 major sports network channels and its own NFL network, the smart suits on Madison Avenue really underestimated the drop in officiating talent from the NFL to Texas High school and Division One Colleges where most of these candy stripers came from.

It’s time the NFL throw its own flag and mark off its own penalty: 15 yards for hubris and a poor labor game plan, bring back the pension plan, reward the refs who grade out the best each Sunday, and take the marginal officials back to school or punt them all together. Make the right call Commissioner. Separate the pros from the Joes. There’s too much money on the table, too much anger on the field, and it would just be too much of a shame to let America's most popular sport degenerate into something like pro wrestling with the outcome about as reliable as a Chicago election..