CBS Gene Steratore sends message to Chiefs-Bills refs before AFC Championship game

CBS rules analyst Gene Steratore had a message for the officiating crew handling the AFC championship game between the Bills and Chiefs. Amid the controversy surrounding the belief that Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was receiving preferential treatment from the refs, Steratore wanted to express his feelings on how the game should be called. “My pregame message to the officiating crew,” he wrote on X.“Let them play physical, right up to that line of being a foul.

Call the obvious and let the incidental/small stuff fall by the wayside.This is the conference championship game, it will be clean – both teams are exceptionally coached and aren’t new to this moment.”The circumstances involving Mahomes and the refs seemed to come to a head last week during the divisional round when Kansas City faced the Texans. Mahomes appeared to benefit from two questionable roughing-the-passer calls during the win. The Chiefs quarterback pushed back on that notion in the lead-up to Sunday’s AFC title game. “I don’t feel that way,” Mahomes told reporters on Wednesday.

“I just try to play football at the end of the day.The referees are doing their best to call the game as fair and proper as best they can.

For me, it’s go out there, play hard, try to do whatever I can to win the football game, and then live with the results based on my effort and how I play the game, and that’s what we preach here in Kansas City.”Clete Blakeman is the referee for the AFC title game at Arrowhead Stadium on Sunday. The Bills will look to exercise some demons after losing to the Chiefs in the playoffs in three of the last four years. This year marks the first time the Bills have made it to the conference championship game since 2021 and only the second time since the Bills went to the Super Bowl in 1994.The Chiefs are looking for history’s first Super Bowl three-peat....