The Football Scientist, KC Joyner, is a Fifth Down contributor. Lab results from “Scientific Football 2009,” to be published in August.

One of the few non-football pastimes I allow myself is watching the Stanley Cup playoffs. As a lifelong Red Wings fan, I have to say that I’ve very much enjoyed this year’s playoffs, but the overriding feeling I’ve had in the first six games of the finals is being appalled at the ineptness of the officiating.

First, there was the missed six-men-on-the-ice penalty that wasn’t called against the Penguins in Game 3 despite their having the extra attacker for over 20 seconds. Then there was the play in Game 1 in which the Red Wings’ Henrik Zetterberg covered the puck in the crease with his hand — an illegal play that I believe is supposed to result in a penalty shot for the other team.

The NBC analyst Darren Pang might have epitomized this best in his postgame review last night when, while getting ready to criticize the officials for a missed call, he said that “the referees have done an outstanding job” this postseason. That obviously isn’t the case, but he isn’t the only one who doesn’t want this part of the game to put a damper on what has otherwise been a really good series — the NHL seems just as culpable. I have not seen or heard one comment from the NHL regarding the state of officiating in the finals despite the fact that it has been a significant story line in most of the six contests.

We don’t have to imagine how the NFL Football would handle such a situation because the league has handled multiple situations of this nature over the years. When Ed Hochuli blew a fumble call early last season that cost the Chargers a win at Denver, the NFL didn’t ignore it or try to act as if he got the call right. The league admitted that he made an error and indicated it was going to note it on his season-long grade.

The reason the NFL does this is because it, probably more than any other organization, realizes that the No. 1 responsibility of a sports league is this: to assure fans that the game they are watching is a fair contest. Pete Rozelle caught on to this early in his NFL Football odds commissionership and it is why he took a hard stance on gambling influences. He knew that any taint of betting by anyone in the league would immediately cast a huge shadow of doubt in fans’ minds that the sport was on the up and up. It is why he was willing to suspend Paul Hornung and Alex Karras for gambling-related issues in 1963 and was ready to let Joe Namath retire if he didn’t divest himself of his interest in the Bachelors III bar. It is also why the current league leadership is doing as much as it can on the performance-enhancement drug and officiating fronts.