Petition to ban Pete Morelli from Philadelphia Eagles games reaches over 40,000 signatures

The Philadelphia Eagles are 5-1 no thanks to NFL referee Pete Morelli. The Birds had to overcome some truly awful officiating on Thursday night to beat the Carolina Panthers. The penalty disparity in the game was an absolute joke.

This wasn’t just a fluky one game sample size, either. The Eagles have been at a significant disadvantage during the last four contests where Morelli’s crew worked the game.

And so now there’s an online petition titled “Pete Morelli should be banned from refereeing Philadelphia Eagles games” that has over 40,000 signatures so far. You can [CLICK HERE] to check it out yourself and sign the petition if you desire.

Will this petition magically solve the NFL’s Morelli problem? No, but the hope is that it’ll at least draw some more attention to this issue. The NFL seriously needs to review the performance of Morelli and his crew.

Eagles head coach Doug Pederson answered questions about the penalties last week.

Q. Are you planning on sending anything to the National Football League in respect to the number of penalties that were called against you and the disparity there?

DOUG PEDERSON: Every week our protocol is to go through and watch the game. [Director of football compliance] Jon Ferrari helps out there, and we look at the game and whether it was a call against us or maybe a call that wasn't made that we felt like should have been made, we send those in. We send those clips into the league office. Every team does this on a Monday, which is, today for us is like a Monday. Just want to get clarification. That's all we're trying to do. Trying to see if there was something that whether the penalty should have happened or shouldn't have happened. That's just protocol. We'll do that over the weekend.

Q. It doesn't seem like an isolated disparity, however, with this officiating crew. In fact, the last four games that they have officiated, Eagles games, it's been 40 to 8 disparity. Is that something that you guys have noticed and plan to alert the league about?

DOUG PEDERSON: Well, I think the league is aware of it. I'm not going to get into all of that. It's just we have to do a better job. We have to coach it and not be -- we can't be getting these flags if they are flags. And then listen, a lot of them were legit. I am not saying they weren’t. A lot of the flags last night were legit calls. So, we've got to do a better job there. But, for whatever reason, it is what it is. But moving forward, we can't worry about it. Bottom line is, we won the game. We figured out how to do that, and that's the bottom line.