The Out Route

Per Off-Wing Opinion, fans are calling for referee Mick McGeough to be fired after a blown call that cost the Oilers a chance at overtime Friday night. The Oilers scored a game-tying goal on a slapshot off of a faceoff, and McGeough claimed that the faceoff had been won with a hand pass and that, as a result, the goal was null. He was showered with garbage on his way off the ice.

A petition for his head already has over 1100 signatures, as McGeough has a history of trying to make his own name the story in any given game. In fact, I've discovered that his Wikipedia page was deleted in order to protect it from angry Oiler fans. An explanation in the page's deletion log read like so:

06:01, 4 November 2006 Lucky 6.9 (Talk | contribs) deleted "Mick McGeough" (content was: '{{db-attack}}Mick McGeough is a NHL referee. He has been verbally attacked for what seems to be poor calls against the Edmonton Oilers.'

In McGeough's defense, he admits to blowing the call -- something most refs don't have the guts to do. Many simply hide behind convoluted excuses that everyone sees through or don't come to the forefront at all. The ref had this to say:

It was a blown call on my part. It was poor judgment on my part. I thought he had his hand on the puck on the faceoff but it was his stick. My judgment was poor on the play.

Besides, can you really expect someone to be a competent ref when their name rhymes with that of a notoriously blind cartoon character?