Many NFL fans will be left with a host of memories from this NFL postseason and Super Bowl XL.

Sadly, it seems, most of them will be bad ones. Sure, Steelers fans can rejoice to the tune of “Our team wasn’t as bad as their team,” and good for Jerome Bettis – he was a likable player for a lot of years.

Pittsburgh did something never done before by beating the top three seeds in their conference and the top seed of the opposing conference, but that’s about the last good story this postseason.

If NFL fans are lucky, they can all look forward to never experiencing such a rotten postseason again.

When reflecting on this postseason, it is hard to pinpoint a single great game among them. The only game that was truly exciting was the Pittsburgh-Indianapolis game, and that was only really exciting because of the worst call in the history of the playoffs, but I will get to that later.

The first two rounds of the playoffs were plagued by blowouts and disappointments. What happened to the great Colts offense? Or the vaunted Bears defense? The only truly significant thing to come of these playoffs was the ending, at least temporarily, of the Patriots dynasty, and there are few who would argue the Patriots deserved to win in Denver.

Often NFL fans expect the best games of a postseason to be the conference championships, and they are typically right. Not this year, however – both the NFC and AFC championships were essentially decided at halftime, and Super Bowl XL was hardly a dramatic spectacle.

Well, the Rolling Stones continually cheating death is something of a spectacle in the minds of some.

So the games were bad. What will be remembered from this postseason? Fans will remember poor officiating.

From the phantom pass interference calls in the Denver-New England game, the morbid officiating in the Colts-Steelers game or the severely slanted officiating in the Super Bowl, this postseason will be remembered for the bad calls. It speaks volumes about the state of NFL officiating when a player can call the zebras out in a postgame interview and receive no fine. Perhaps now Joey Porter feels that justice has been served, as the Steelers were on the right side of almost every close call in Super Bowl XL.

Officials are only human, and there will be bad calls from time to time, but the sheer volume of bad calls in this postseason should be reason enough for the NFL to review how playoff officials are selected, how reviews work and whether they should be full time employees with the NFL.

Steelers fans rejoice – you have much to be proud of – but the rest of us may be left wondering where our postseason went and why.

– Nathan Chiaravalloti is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Davenport.