Few things in sports are easier than complaining about the poorness with which a given NFL game is being officiated. "How could he miss that call?" we say, shifting comfortably on the couch. "That's embarrassing." And yet, for all that fans complain about NFL officials, we know that they're a necessary part of the game—if not quite the thin blue line between society and anarchy, then at a least a thin zebra-striped line between games that unfold according to recognized rules and in something like their usual running times and … well, games that have looked like those that filled the first two weeks of the NFL season. NFL owners remain in a standoff with the NFL officials whom they've locked out, and may well remain there for some time, given that they're NFL owners and all. But after another week of flubby, draggy, mistake-filled and intermittently anarchic NFL games, fans find themselves in the strange position of pulling for the officials to get back on the field.

The Journal's referee quiz is a good reminder of how hard the job of NFL official is. But such is the ridiculousness of the current situation that blown calls are only a small part of the integrity-damage the NFL has incurred during its replacement ref misadventure. The official removed from Sunday's New Orleans-Carolina game because he is a die-hard Saints fan is just one of many recent goofy examples. While plenty of the discussion after Monday night's game between the Broncos and Falcons revolved around how much Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning has left in the tank, he was protected in part by another series of shaky calls that even ESPN announcer Mike Tirico called “embarrassing.” (And this quote was repeated at nfl.com, of all places.) The bigger story after another weekend of wildly mis-refereed games remains a two-parter: How long can this go on, and how long until someone gets hurt?

"The replacement officials are in way over their heads, and they can't control the game at this level. With the replacements on the field Sunday, NFL games were teetering on the edge of uncontrolled, borderline riots," the St. Louis Post Dispatch's Bryan Burwell writes. "It's so easy to regard pro officials as easily disposable parts when you have no respect for the physical demands on the job. But now we're seeing a mountain of evidence from every one of these games why the locked-out officials can't be replaced like so many indistinguishable light bulbs."

As central as NFL owners' signature stubbornness is to the ongoing lockout, the bigger issue standing in the way of resolving the labor standoff that is objectively hurting the NFL's product is that the NFL knows that its product is going to get consumed anyway. Tom Scocca opined bitterly on this in Slate at the start of the season, and the two goofy/scary weeks of games played with replacement referees have done nothing to diminish the sense that the NFL doesn't much care how watchable its games are, so secure are the owners in the knowledge that they'll be watched, anyway.

"Even if everyone—from management to coaches to players to fans—thinks the replacement refs undermine the quality of the game, the NFL has nothing to worry about after Sunday," SB Nation's Andrew Sharp writes. "The NFL's not a neighborhood restaurant, where a couple of embarrassing reviews threaten the business. The NFL is McDonalds, a corporation so ubiquitous and entrenched all over America and the world that it almost doesn't matter what they actually serve customers. The NFL's number one asset is its own ubiquity." The gamble the owners have made is that the league's ubiquity, and players, will survive until they get the deal they want.