One of the N.F.L.’s locked-out officials was at home Sunday waiting and watching, like everyone else, for the weekly blooper reel to begin.

It does not take long with the replacement officials for the comedy of errors to unfold, although the hilarity went out of this situation last week. The performance bar was set so low then that the N.F.L. could play limbo with it, but it allowed Sunday’s games to feel like an improvement because at least it didn’t seem as if brawls were about to erupt across the television screen — until the final game of the night, when officials struggled to control repeated skirmishes between New England and Baltimore. Instead, officials had a problem with which direction the kickoff would go in Dallas, then with an incorrect illegal block call in Minnesota.

You could laugh those off, of course, and maybe you would have if they hadn’t been followed by missed helmet-to-helmet hits on Tony Romo and Darrius Heyward-Bey, and the failure to overturn a call that the Dolphins’ Anthony Fasano had caught a pass near the goal line against the Jets, and allowing 49ers Coach Jim Harbaugh to twice challenge calls, even though he had used all of his timeouts.