While yours truly was spending most of the afternoon and into the early evening taking in the annual Marshall-West Virginia game in Morgantown, MDS was holding down the PFT fort.

He posted among other things an item regarding the $15,000 fine imposed on Saints coach Sean Payton for criticizing game officials who missed the fact that Broncos linebacker Jamie Winborn lined up offside during a key third-and-one play at the end of New Orleans’ loss at Denver.

On Monday, Payton reportedly called the no-call a “hard pill” to swallow and that he would be raising the matter with NFL officiating guru Mike Pereira.

The decision meshes with Commissioner Roger Goodell’s recent memo reiterating that the policy prohibiting criticism of officiating means what it says, notwithstanding information we recently received from NFL spokesman Greg Aiello suggesting that discipline would arise only in the event of personal attacks on officials or criticism of the integrity of officiating.

But why, then, didn’t Chargers coach Norv Turner get fined for calling the officiating blunder that caused his team to lose to the Broncos a week earlier “unacceptable“?  And why hasn’t Cowboys owner Jerry Jones been fined for twice ripping publicly  into referee Ed Hochuli in the days after Hochuli’s last name transformed into a verb?

A cynical mind would think that Turner got a free pass because he made his remarks as part of a mandatory post-game press conference, and the league recognized that there’s no way he could have been expected under the circumstances to say nothing about the error.  A cynical mind also would be inclined to wonder whether the league office is treading carefully with Jones, an influential owner who could go a long way toward brokering a new CBA or blowing everything up and pushing pro football toward a baseball-style system without a salary cap.

Regardless, the rules are either going to be applied as written, or they’re not.  And if for every fine issued there are multiple circumstances in which fines should have been issued but weren’t, this means that the league isn’t applying its rules fairly and consistently.

So the league either needs to change the manner in which this specific rule is applied, or the league needs to change the rule to something that the league will be able to apply consistently.

Such as, for example, a rule prohibiting only personal attacks on officials or criticism of the integrity of officiating.