Even anti-union Republicans wanted the NFL to settle with its referees, but this was still a show of right wing arrogance

Those of us hoping that the National Football League's lockout of its regular referees would end in a victory for the regular refs got our wish. The lockout, which began in June, ended with the refs in good financial shape, and along the way such anti-union, Republican stalwarts as Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan came close to siding with the refs. "It is time to get the real refs," Ryan told a Cincinnati town-hall audience.

The regular refs now have an eight-year contract that will raise their average salary from $149,000 a year to $205,000 by 2019. The refs' defined pension plan (the key issue in the lockout) will remain in place for current officials through the 2016 season (or until an official earns 20 years of service), and when the NFL's defined contribution plan kicks in the annual league payment will begin at $18,000 and increase to more than $23,000 in 2019.

The biggest downside of the agreement is that new refs will not get the defined benefit plan the veteran refs will have until 2016. A two-tier benefit system has been locked in place.

However, if you were pulling for the regular refs, as I was, what is most worrying is why the lockout ended. The settlement did not come because fans or players threatened to boycott NFL games; nor did the settlement arise from a brilliant organizing strategy by the regular refs. The settlement came about because the replacement refs – whom nobody seemed to want to call scabs – proved to be such clowns.

The replacement refs made Ray Anderson, the league's executive vice president for football operations, look silly when he declared: "You've never paid for an NFL ticket to watch somebody officiate a game."

The turning point in the lockout came on a nationally televised, Monday-night game between the Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks. On the final play of the game, a crew of replacements refs ruled a pass that Green Bay defensive back MD Jennings intercepted was a Seattle touchdown when Seattle receiver Golden Tate grabbed part of the ball after Jennings hit the ground with it.

Fans watching the game were outraged, and soon the blown call was being shown over and over on television newscasts and sports programs around the country. In a Tuesday ESPN radio interview, Green Bay's star quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, complained: "The game is being tarnished by an NFL who obviously cares more about saving some money than having the integrity of the game diminished."

In the normally anti-labor Wall Street Journal, Minnesota's Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton joined Rodgers in complaining about the officiating. "We hit a new low in this week's Monday Night Football," Tarkenton wrote in an op-ed punningly titled "Pro Football Keeps Fumbling".

The larger political problem for those of us who supported regular refs is the unreliability of such turning points. Mitt Romney, with his dismissive remarks about the 47% of Americans who won't vote for him because they are government dependents, is living proof that the right in America is having trouble keeping its arrogance in check.

Romney at least appears to be trying to back off his 47% remarks. The same cannot be said for those who run the NFL. The league's owners show no sign of believing they made a mistake in asking the refs to give up a pension plan that barely made a dent in the annual $9.3bn industry that is NFL football.

The same clique who for years denied that repeated concussions were causing many of their players lifetime brain damage (the Alzheimer's rate among NFL players with five or more seasons is four times the national average) persist in thinking of pro football and its personnel as little more than a "product".

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College. He is currently at work on a book about the 1964 West Point football team and its service in Vietnam.