Running thread on garbage officiating

[RhodyRams]

Not to mention a no call false start on Langford, a block in the back, a DPI and a RTP all not called against da Bears

 

[Angry Ram]

Guys, I've never been this infuriated with officiating. It's one thing when they miss or make a bogus call now and then, but its beyond hypocritical when the league touts the shitchicken legion of bullshit then tells the refs to watch a team.

When other teams do it, it's physical. When the Rams do it, it's dirty. Shut the fuck up.

 

[rhinobean]

Don't you think that the viqueens. coach made a stink so as to have the officials scrutinize the Rams extra hard! The more penalties called on the Rams, the harder it is to win the games! Would help if the offense would have played better!

 

[CGI_Ram]

My biggest beef with penalties is when they are borderline.

I mean, if it's not a certain penalty... Don't throw the damn flag.

 

[Prime Time]

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...d-jaguars-winning-fg-shouldve-never-happened/

NFL says officials erred, Jaguars’ winning FG should’ve never happened
Posted by Zac Jackson on November 16, 2015

Getty Images

Sunday, the Jaguars beat the Ravens on a field goal that came on an untimed down after time expired due to penalty.

Monday, the NFL acknowledged that that field goal never should have happened and that the last timed play of the game should have been blown dead because the Jaguars weren’t set.

Oops.

NFL Spokesman Michael Signora said that officials erred in allowing the play to go on despite all 11 Jaguars not being set. Jaguars quarterbackBlake Bortles was taken down by Elvis Dumervil of the Ravens on that play but was taken down by his facemask, resulting in a 15-yard penalty and an untimed down.

Jason Myers made a 53-yard field goal on the next play to give the Jaguars a 22-20 win.

Per Signora, the correct call would have been a false start on the Jaguars who weren’t set. A 10-second runoff for that penalty in that situation would have ended the game.

Instead, the Jaguars moved to 3-6 and the Ravens fell to 2-7.

 

[MTRamsFan]

Interesting. I understand missing a call, etc. due to the "Human Element", but damn these guys not knowing the rules is freaking unbelievable. There are too many rules which have watered down this game. Let's pull the pads off and play touch. I'm sure even in touch football the referees would freak it up.

 

[Mackeyser]

Good thing we don't need full time refs...

 

[Prime Time]

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/11/17/will-nfl-take-action-against-morellis-crew-again/

Will NFL take action against Morelli’s crew, again?
Posted by Mike Florio on November 17, 2015

AP

After a clock error that didn’t impact the outcome of a Monday night game between the Steelers and Chargers, the NFL suspended without pay the side judge responsible for keeping track of the time and otherwise downgraded the rest of Pete Morelli’s crew. So now that Morelli’s crew blatantly failed to blow dead the last scrimmage snap in the Jaguars-Ravens game when the Jacksonville offensive players weren’t set at the snap, what will the NFL do?

The league already has admitted the error. The question at this point is the consequence. For high-profile mistakes made in prime time (the Steelers-Chargers game and the Lions-Seahawks illegal bat blunder, both on Monday nights), the NFL opted to take unprecedented measures to impose discipline beyond the normal grading process. Rob Vernatchi was suspended with pay for the San Diego clock error, and Greg Wilson was moved from a Sunday night game between the Patriots and Colts.

So for a huge mistake that took a win away from the Ravens and gave it to the Jaguars in a game that was subsumed within the cluster of 1:00 p.m. ET kickoffs, will the league take action?

If it cares about consistency, the NFL should. If it cares about getting all calls right, the NFL should do fewer full-blown, dog-and-pony replay reviews and more real-time, quick-fix, know-it-when-you-see-it, buzz-the-ref-and-fix-the-mess officiating.

Imposing discipline on Morelli’s crew will do nothing to undo the damage to the Ravens, or to legitimize a race to the bottom in the AFC South in which the Jaguars picked up an undeserved edge. The takeaway from this mess shouldn’t be to take away assignments or money from Morelli and the other officials on his crew, but to come up with effective ways of getting it right, all the time.
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Break them up… dismiss those the league can afford to go without and check their pockets for hooch flasks.

This is a big stage, big business, for big boys who can get it right in big situations.

BIG mistake to keep them on the field to bungle even BIGGER situations that the league can’t UNDO… and just apologize for.

Apologies aren’t enough anymore for repeated mistakes like this.
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The officiating has gotten worse & worse over the past 3-4 seasons. As much as Goodell talks about “the integrity of the game” you’d think he’d try to get this corrected. But I’m sure nothing will happen until it’s starts affecting money.
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Once discipline. Twice fire them. I hate to say it and I know they have families (but this is also a second job as NFL officials are part time which is also stupid) but directly impacting the outcome of a game is a fire-able offense. Draft status and playoff status are impacted. I am sure they are good men, but they can’t be NFL officials and blow it this badly more than once.
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I agree. I have never understood why officials/refs are so untouchable. If they fail multiple times they should be fired. And I think it is crazy that a multibillion dollar league does not have full time officials. that is insane.
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It’s understandable that with all the camera angles now available to us as fans that we are going to see things that the officiating crew missed at field level in real time. Those missed calls have always been there and it’s part of the game. But clock and mistakes on procedural call are just unacceptable. They are not something we are suddenly able to see and therefore take note of. Somehow even with the changes that have given the officials more tools than ever officiating has gotten worse.

Slapping an official on the wrist after the fact is hardly a fix. A league office that besmirches the word integrity every time they use it could take a tiny step towards redemption by making more effort to get it right.
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The officials need to be made full-time NFL employees, which means they can spend non-game days training, watching film, etc. so they can become better officials. The NFL level of football is too fast for these guys to show up once a week and expect to be good at this.

 

[Ram Quixote]

Let's not forget the crack-back block on Brown. Fisher wasn't a fan of that one either.

 

[Prime Time]

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...kins-got-out-of-bounds-with-two-seconds-left/

NFL admits Sammy Watkins got out of bounds with two seconds left
Posted by Michael David Smith on November 25, 2015

The NFL has admitted that Bills receiver Sammy Watkins got out of bounds with two seconds remaining on Monday night, meaning the Bills should have had time to run one last play in their 20-13 loss to the Patriots.

NFL V.P. of officiating Dean Blandino said on NFL Network on Tuesday night that Watkins rolled out of bounds without being touched, which means the clock should have stopped. The official closest to the play erroneously thought Watkins was giving himself up in the field of play and signaled for the clock to keep running.

“He is down in bounds, but he’s not contacted,” Blandino said as he showed video of the play. “He’s attempting to get out of bounds, you want to give that player the opportunity to get out of bounds, and really, that’s what should have happened.”

For the official right on top of that play to screw it up is a serious mistake. It also doesn’t help matters that the NFL waited until Tuesday night to acknowledge the error. That led to a day of confusion in which many fans, wrongly interpreting the rule, posted on social media that the clock kept running because Watkins wasn’t moving forward when he went out of bounds.

It’s good that the NFL is transparent enough to acknowledge such mistakes, but the league would do better to acknowledge those mistakes more quickly. Even better, of course, would be not to make mistakes in the first place.

 

[Prime Time]

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...s-crew-yanked-from-week-13-monday-night-game/

Pete Morelli’s crew yanked from Week 13 Monday night game
Posted by Mike Florio on December 1, 2015

Getty Images

After dispensing no additional discipline beyond the grading process in response to multiple errors made by the officials during the Week 11 Monday night game, the NFL has decided to take action in response to mistakes made during one of the two late-afternoon games from the twelfth Sunday of the regular season.

Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the NFL has removed referee Pete Morelli’s crew from the Dallas-Washington game to be played on Monday night. Morelli’s crew has been reassigned to another game.

It’s the third time this season the NFL has taken specific action in response to officiating errors. Side judge Rob Vernatchi was suspended with pay after a clock error in the Steelers-Chargers Monday night game, and back judge Greg Wilson was assigned away from a Sunday night game between the Colts and Patriots after missing the illegal bat at the end of the Lions-Seahawks game.

 

[Selassie I]

Why do I get the feeling that these failing refs will now be assigned to work our games?

 

[Prime Time]

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2015/12/17/nfl-officiating-worse-ever-ways-improve-twitter-social-media

The Officiating Crisis: Worse than Ever, or Just Louder Critics?
A series of high-profile gaffes has forced the NFL to make policy changes for the playoffs. But are things really as bad as they seem, or are mistakes being amplified by the constant scrutiny of every play by everyone from every angle? The MMQB investigates
by Emily Kaplan and Robert Klemko

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

“Referees of football and basketball games today are being accused of worse blunders than ever before.” —Sports Illustrated, March 26, 1962

“It is hard to remember a season that produced such a rampant display of human fallibility as has been revealed—on television, always on television—by the officiating crews of the NFL.” —Sports Illustrated, Oct. 9, 1978

“Pro football has been victimized by incompetence this year.” —Los Angeles Times, Nov. 6, 1996

“Criticism of NFL officials has seldom been as vociferous as it has been this season.” —USA Today, Dec. 1, 1998

“Regular Officials Back, and So Are Complaints.” —New York Times, Nov. 12, 2012

These are the end times, once again.

One month until the playoffs, and the chorus of criticism over NFL officiating that has faded in and out for decades has hit another crescendo. The griping over costly mistakes got so loud this season that the NFL was forced to act. On Wednesday, Dean Blandino, the league’s vice president of officiating, announced that during this year’s playoffs the lines of communication between the referee on the field and the NFL’s New York officiating command center will be widened beyond instant replay.

Game officials will now be able to consult Blandino or his representative on issues such as assessment of penalty yardage, the game clock and other “administrative” matters, though Blandino said New York will not be calling penalties, changing fouls or otherwise getting involved in judgment calls that aren’t in the purview of replay.

A well-placed officiating source told The MMQB that these “consultations” have already been going on with select crews this year, suggesting that even before this season’s series of high-profile gaffes that outraged coaches and fans and undermined credibility, the league knew it had to do something to address the state of officiating.

And yet it sure feels like we’ve been here before. Here’s NFL spokesman Greg Aiello, in 1997, talking to the Dallas Morning News: “Every year at about this time we start hearing about how bad [officiating] is. It’s an annual event, like Groundhog Day.”

So which is it—an unprecedented crisis, or a Bill Murray time loop, with criticism now amplified through the bullhorn of social media? The MMQB analyzed statistics, delved into policy and interviewed former NFL officials, current players, coaches and front-office personnel to answer two burning questions: Is officiating actually worse than it’s ever been? And how can the league make officiating better, and snap out of its recurring nightmare?

* * *

Photo: Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

A quick recap of The MMQB’s survey on the state of officiating, before we dive in.

Former NFL referee Mike Pereira: “I don’t think there’s anybody outside of Blandino and [Roger] Goodell who would say the officiating has been as good as it was before.”

Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman: “They criticize the refs the same way people criticize players. You watched it in slow motion; I experienced it in full speed.”

Sherman’s teammate, defensive end Michael Bennett: “[Officials] don’t seem to be upheld to any standard. The players are noticing it’s worse, and so are the fans. They’re causing people to lose games.”

Ben Austro, Editor in Chief of the popular officiating website FootballZebras.com: “I definitely see that the quality is not what it was, but it’s not off by a lot. It’s not like this terrible epidemic social media might make you believe.”

A high-ranking AFC front-office executive: “I wouldn’t be able to say it’s worse, but I would be able to say I can’t remember when there was this much confusion or [this many] communication breakdowns.”

Former referee Gerry Austin: “There have been a few hiccups this year, maybe more hiccups than there have been in years past, but the whole system isn’t broken.”

Among the rash of mistakes, the NFL has publicly admitted to these prominent errors this season:

Photo: Otto Greule Jr./Getty Images
The back judge in the “illegal bat” incident involving the Seahawks and Lions was perfectly positioned to make the correct call, yet failed to do so.

• In the Week 4 Detroit-Seattle game on Monday Night Football, the back judge failed to flag Seahawks linebacker K.J. Wright for illegally batting a Calvin Johnson fumble out of the end zone, a penalty that would have given the Lions, trailing 13-10, the ball on the one-yard line with under two minutes to play. Instead, the Seahawks got the ball and ran out the clock for the victory.

• In the Week 5 San Diego-Pittsburgh MNF game, the crew failed to notice the clock continuing to run after a touchback on a Chargers kickoff, costing the Steelers 18 seconds on their critical final drive.

• With under five seconds to play in the Week 10 Jacksonville-Baltimore game, the officials missed a false start penalty on the Jaguars that would have resulted in a 10-second runoff, ending the game. Instead, the Jags benefited from a face mask penalty on Baltimore and, with an untimed down, kicked the game-winning field goal.

• In the Week 11 Bill-Patriots game, the official along the sideline failed to stop the clock when Sammy Watkins went out of bounds untouched with two second left, costing Buffalo a chance at a game-tying Hail Mary. That game also included an inadvertent whistle that negated a potential long gain on a Danny Amendola reception in the third quarter.

While the social-media pulse on Sundays and Monday nights would imply that the quality of officiating is at an all-time low, Blandino says that officials have not been measurably worse than past years. Earlier this month in his weekly video, he said officiating crews were averaging about 4.3 mistakes a game, roughly the same rate as the past 10 to 15 years.

“We’ve had high-profile situations, mistakes in high-profile games, and that generates more discussion,” Blandino told The MMQB last week. “With where we are today as a society with social media and instant access and instant ability to comment and critique and debate, it’s created a narrative.”

The NFL keeps its grading of officials private, and it is difficult to quantify missed penalties or misapplications of the rules. In terms of the number of calls being made, teams are averaging 14.1 accepted penalties per game, the highest total through 14 weeks in more than a decade. But such numbers must be understood in the context of the league’s ambiguous and amorphous “points of emphasis,” perhaps the biggest factor governing the rise or fall in particular calls—and contributing to confusion amongst players and fans.

The term refers to the officials’ focus on specific rules during a season, either for clarity or to pursue NFL policy. The changing points of emphasis from year to year help explain why it suddenly seems that previously overlooked fouls are being called far more frequently, and they help justify fines for plays that run counter to the growing emphasis on safety. The NFL’s penalty tallies represent myriad fluctuating emphases that players believe push and pull at one another.

For instance, according to league data, flags for illegal use of the hands spiked from 2013 (103) to ’14 (233), as did defensive holding (from 226 to 346) and offensive pass interference (75 to 142). “Every time they try to implement a point of emphasis,” says Washington safety Dashon Goldson, “it seems like they exaggerate that for that year, and miss other penalties. Last year with pass interference it got outrageous.”

That opinion was popular among players The MMQB interviewed—and was roundly rejected by former referees, exemplifying the clear split between the officials and the officiated on nearly all matters.

* * *

Photo: Toni L. Sandys/ The Washington Post via Getty Images
Gruden would like to see every play challengeable.

The NFL has 122 officials. Only one of them, Carl Johnson, is a full-time league employee.

Echoing a common refrain among critics proposing ways to improve officiating, Washington coach Jay Gruden says, “Make officials full-time. Really let them study the game and game trends, because there are a lot of things that make us question whether or not they understand the rules.”

Nearly six years ago, Mike Pereira tried to do just that. Shortly before retiring as vice president of officiating in April 2010, Pereira arrived at league headquarters in Manhattan with a Powerpoint presentation outlining his proposal to make 17 referees full-time employees of the league and create a training center where zebras could convene to discuss rules changes and interpretations, undergo evaluations, train and work with teams. He called his imaginary ref hub the Officiating Institute.

“They basically laughed me out of the room,” Pereira says. “It was disappointing. I was proud of my little Powerpoint. I did make sure that Goodell got a copy, but it’s probably still sitting under a stack of papers somewhere.”

While the idea makes sense in theory, creating a cadre of full-timers may be not be practicable. Start with an often-overlooked aspect of such an idea: Do current officials even want it? Most have other careers, some lucrative (attorneys, CEOs, bankers), others stable (teachers, college officiating supervisors, law enforcement).Ed Hochuli is a partner at a Phoenix law firm. Referee Gene Steratore and his older brother, Tony, a back judge, co-own a sanitary supply company.

“We haven’t conducted a poll anytime recently,” says Jim Quirk, the executive director of the NFL Referee Association, “but from what I know about the 122 guys in the league—I will say not everyone, but a large majority would refuse the opportunity to become full-time.”

But the most significant hurdle may be not be the men in stripes themselves but the fine print of the collective bargaining agreement. The CBA that was signed after the 2012 lockout and that extends through 2020 includes a provision that, absent NFLRA consent, the NFL can hire no more than 17 game officials as full-time employees. (The sole current full-timer, Johnson, was Blandino’s predecessor before stepping back onto the field in 2012.) “We need to work through some of those issues, some of the labor management issues,” says Blandino.

The NFL began interviewing other full-time candidates in 2013, but the NFLRA threw a challenge flag. It turns out the league and union differed on a most basic principle: how to define employment. To wit, the NFL considers its workers to be at-will employees—“they can terminate you if they don’t like the way you comb your hair,” Quirk says—while NFL officials must be members of the NFLRA, a union with inherent protections. Neither side was willing to cede on the issue, so progress ceased.

Even if the NFL did make one member of each officiating crew full-time, that hardly guarantees improved performance. Is spending all week studying the rule book and analyzing game tape going to help an official make a decision on a bang-bang play? And Austin, the 25-year NFL official and current ESPN analyst, adds, “Is there even enough for everyone to do on a full-time basis? They could study more, but I don’t think that’s the problem.”

* * *

Earlier this season, Quirk arrived at the league offices for meetings, and like Pereira he was armed with an idea. Quirk served 21 years as an official and spent three years training umpires before taking on his current role with the union. His son is an NFL back judge, and Quirk has the pulse of officials in the league. This, Quirk figured, was as good a time as any to tell the commissioner what he felt was the biggest hindrance to officiating in 2015.

“Roger,” Quirk said. “You have to simplify the rule book. It’s just too complicated. It’s too long. It involves too many exceptions to the rule.”

Photo: Tom Lynn for Sports Illustrated/The MMQB
Dez Bryant goes to ground, and a firestorm erupts.

Rehashing the Dez Bryant play in the NFC divisional round is an exercise only Jerry Jones and Bryant himself would relish, but that infamous no-catch decision might be the perfect distillation of officiating frustrations in 2015. Consider the fallout from the Bryant incident: The NFL recognized there was a problem, tried to fix it, but in doing so just muddied the waters further.

As debate swirled as to whether Bryant had “made a football move” or “failed to complete the process of making a catch” when the ball came loose at the goal line in that January game in Green Bay, the NFL felt pressure to clarify what constitutes a catch. This offseason the league issued a 158-word explanation that shifted the burden from “making a football move” to the equally nebulous notion of “clearly becoming a runner.”

The clarification has satisfied no one, and officials, players, broadcasters and viewers all remain flummoxed as to what a catch is. When people who’ve spent their entire lives playing or watching football don’t understand the rule for something as basic as a catch, the problem is fundamental. Says Bears wide receiver Alshon Jeffery: “It’s just confusing; it’s not consistent.”

Perhaps it’s not the officials’ decision-making that’s to blame, but rather the clunky language they must abide by. Several ex-referees who spoke to The MMQB said the rule book is too couched in exceptions and nuanced language about what might possibly happen that could affect a decision, and not clear enough in its basic definitions.

If each play is inherently complex, they suggest, make the rules governing those plays simpler. (Interestingly, the NFL rule book, at roughly 58,000 words, is about half the length of Major League Baseball’s. It is, however, more than twice as long as FIFA’s Laws of the Game, at about 23,000 words.)

“It used to be you caught the ball in the end zone and you didn’t have to do anything else but hold onto it,” says Bill Etzler, a former NFL official of 12 years who retired after the 2012 season. “And they screwed with that.”

Adds former official and NFLRA boss Scott Green, “It’s taken a life of its own. When I started in the league, it was, when in doubt, it’s complete. It wasn’t being analyzed so closely.”

This offseason a six-member NFL committee will yet again reconsider the catch rule. While they’re at it, the league might consider auditing its entire rule book. Rather than an isolated problem, confusion over the catch is a symptom of inherent flaws in the way the rules are written.

* * *

There’s no debating that Pete Morelli’s crew blundered during its Week 12 assignment, Arizona at San Francisco. Among its errors, the crew stalled for nearly five minutes while trying to determine the down after a 49ers penalty. Cardinals coach Bruce Arians later remarked of the officials, “They can’t count to three.”

Referee uproar, circa 1978.

Blandino, apparently, had had enough. Morelli’s crew, which was scheduled for the Sunday night prime-time game in Week 13, was swiftly reassigned to an afternoon slot with significantly fewer eyeballs. Says Quirk: “I cannot think of another example of a crew being flexed out of a game. I’m not sure what good it accomplished.”

It wasn’t the first time Blandino exercised authority in 2015. The league suspended side judge Rob Vernatchi with pay for his role in the Pittsburgh-San Diego clock error and removed back judge Greg Wilson from a prime-time assignment after the illegal bat fiasco.

To a man, players we spoke with celebrated the idea of punishing officials for missteps. Said Washington defensive lineman Ricky Jean Francois, “The same way they can fine us for a lack of judgment, they need to fine the referees. Let’s make it even. If referees know they can get fined or suspended, the game will go a hell of a lot smoother. They would take the job more seriously, and you wouldn’t have referees way on the other side of field making calls they can't possibly see.”

“To me, these are all unusual PR moves,” Austro, of FootballZebras.com, says. “Ask any official, and they’ll say they go out and officiate the game. If it’s Monday night, it’s Monday night. If it’s Sunday afternoon in a game that airs in two markets only, then it’s that game. The league office, however, has to watch optics. So reassigning Morelli’s crew has the appearance of ‘doing something.’ ”

Many mistakes go unnoticed by the general public, swept away in an avalanche of Sunday NFL content. But the big ones blow up. They get retweeted and GIF’d and broken down to the nth degree by the likes of Pereira, Austin and Mike Carey, former officials who have cornered the new market for officiating expertise in the media. Fox hired Pereira in 2010, a move that other networks and other sports have since replicated.

The rise of the officiating analysts has humanized the refs—and, in the age of HD broadcasts with two dozen cameras and super-slo-mo, further magnified their flaws. It’s not just the masses on Twitter instantly critiquing officials; it’s trained experts with the veneer of authority doing so on broadcasts watched by the NFL’s tens of millions of fans.

The presence of former officials on TV has, in a way, institutionalized the process of second-guessing. And the fact that Pereira, Austin and Carey often disagree with their former colleagues on the field or with decisions from the replay headquarters only adds to fans’ confusion and the sense that officiating is inconsistent and flawed.

The expectation of perfection, Pereira says, is a phenomenon as new as it is unattainable. “Social media,” he says, “has changed everything. You’re not ever going to get away with a mistake. And for every mistake that’s made, nobody ever talks about the great call.” Pereira himself tweets prolifically during games.

Quirk thinks critics, as well as the graders in NFL headquarters, need to be realistic about the nature of live-game officiating. “Let’s remember that we are not officiating John Madden’s video game,” he says. “The guys on the field are officiating, at real speed, things that are happening very quickly. The people who are grading the game tapes are looking at it on an HD TV screen, going back and forth in slow motion.”

One former official lamented the inherent stress of having each full-speed call and non-call analyzed and judged against a two-inch thick rule book. “Imagine if your boss sat down and graded every single move you did, minute by minute, in the course of the workday, rather than looking at the total performance,” says the former official, who asked to remain anonymous. “And that’s what determines your bonus.”

Photo: Courtesy NFL
Dean Blandino in the New York officiating command center.

By policy, refs are hamstrung. They can’t defend their performance to the press and public save for the occasional explanation to a pool reporter at the conclusion of a game. Coaches and players, for their part, are often fined for speaking out against the officials. Those policies are place, Blandino says, so that he can have honest conversations with clubs without fearing leaks to the media. Instead, Blandino assumes responsibility as point man.

He posts weekly videos on the NFL’s website, appears on national radio and even tweets during games. As NFL fans feel closer to than ever to the sport, failure to be transparent spikes skepticism. However, some officiating sources describe Blandino’s public role as “troublesome,” as he and only he can control the narrative.

And now, with the plan to widen New York’s involvement in in-game decisions, the fear is that officials will further question their own judgment and lean on Blandino and others in the league office as a crutch.

* * *

What led to the notion, true or not, that officiating in the NFL has worsened?

A number of former officials point to the 2012 lockout. For one month the football consumer sat front row for a cavalcade of follies, punctuated by the iconic image of two replacement officials standing side by side, one signaling touchdown and the other signaling incomplete pass, all while Seahawks and Packers wrestled on the ground.

They called it the Fail Mary, and Scott Green watched at home in Vienna, Va., waiting for the phone to ring. Goodell later said the game "may have pushed the parties further along" in CBA negotiations.

“This will tell you all you need to know about how little the league thinks of officiating,” Green says. “They literally thought they could go find a bunch of guys who had never refereed in the league and do two training sessions, and they would be capable of officiating NFL football games.”

Fans were overjoyed when the real refs returned from the lockout. The honeymoon didn’t last.

The CBA that was completed two days after the Fail Mary brought officials back, and drove away many. Retirement benefits were sweetened, according to Etzler and Green, ushering in a youth movement that some former officials believe laid the groundwork for instability and the inexperience of current crews. There have been 23 new officials since the beginning of 2014, out of a total of 122.

“There was a movement to get all the older officials to retire and bring up the younger group, and they were relatively successful in that,” says Etzler, who retired in 2012. “But they lost the mentoring of the older officials. They moved people to higher levels without the necessary experience.”

Etzler, who watches the NFL religiously from his home in Aiken, S.C., can’t get through a game without catching the most basic of infractions being missed by today’s officials. “Some of the misapplication of the rules is astounding,” he says. “I was watching New Orleans and Carolina. One thing the guy in the white hat has to do is count the number of players in the huddle, and there were two plays with too many men in the huddle, and he missed it.”

The current landscape is not conducive to development. NFL Europe, for all its flaws, was the D-league for officials that the NFL desperately needed. That league tapped rising stars from college and groomed them on the pace and rules of the pros. Though the NFL created an Advanced Development Program three years ago, there is very little applied training. Prospective officials work a few preseason quarters, observe on the sidelines and are thrust into NFL game action.

“You have a requirement that says an official can’t work a Super Bowl for five years, and part of that is because it really takes you five years to get up to the speed of the game,” Pereira says. “Some are doing well and some are struggling, and some are creating difficult situations for the veterans.”

* * *

In March 2010, in his last major act as VP of officiating, Pereira moved the umpire from his traditional spot just behind the linebackers to the offensive backfield. The justification: Umpires were knocked down by players more than 100 times in 2009. Two suffered concussions and three suffered bodily injuries requiring surgery.

Some saw a blatant hold on this recent SI cover.

The consequence? The umpire may be safer, but officiating crew surrendered the best seat in the house to watch line play. “I never have been a fan of moving the umpire,” says Quirk, who served in that role for part of his 21-year officiating career. “I thought that was one of the bigger mistakes.

You took [the umpire] out of the action. If you had an umpire who had good peripheral vision and fast feet, he belonged where he was previously stationed. Right now, it is nearly impossible for anyone to call offensive holding. I personally think it caused more problems that it probably was meant to solve.”

So that’s one idea to improve officiating—move the umpire back to his old spot. There are plenty more.

Pereira still believes the best fix is full-time officials: “I want to see the leaders of every crew work together so that messages can be more consistent,” he says.

A number of players suggested adding an eighth official to the field, a measure implemented by the NCAA and experimented with by the NFL this offseason. Blandino said the goal would be to get eyes on vantages lost when the umpire moved. NCAA penalty data suggest that the eighth official improved the quality of interior line officiating while not significantly raising the number of penalties in a game. But adding another body to each team requires vetting and training 17 more officials in the midst of an era of high turnover.

Amy Trask, former CEO of the Oakland Raiders and current CBS NFL analyst, suggests a tweak to that idea. “Take the extra official idea and add the official to the booth,” she says. “He or she is in constant communication with the referee, and you expand what is reviewable by replay. No behind-the-curtain, Wizard of Oz-type deal. He or she would not be an executive but a teammate of the men and women on the field, one who can review plays from the press box.”

Expanding the role of replay could result in longer games, something the NFL and its broadcast partners would like to avoid. Players and coaches, however, are less concerned with that prospect than with getting the call right.

“We ran a play [against the Cowboys] and they called offensive pass interference, and it wasn’t even close,” says Washington’s Gruden. “One thing that would really help the game would be the ability to challenge anything. Look at the pick-six we got against Carolina. They call that back [for illegal contact on the defensive back], and they go down and score and it’s a 14-point swing.

“Let the coaches have one challenge where they can challenge any kind of penalty. I don’t have a problem with the no-calls. It’s the calls that they make that are not actual penalties that drive me up a wall. That’s what makes you feel like it’s personal, when you know it’s not.”

Says Seattle linebacker K.J. Wright, himself the beneficiary of one of the season’s biggest officiating mistakes, “Sometimes they call offensive holding when there is none, and defensive holding when there is none. I don’t care if it works out for us or not; I want it to be right. A small thing can decide a game, so review it.”

* * *

Photo: Courtesy NFL
The NFL replay command center in New York will be more involved than ever in the playoffs this season.

The MMQB agrees.

The disconnect between the broadcast experience and the real game needs to be bridged. Blandino’s instinct to increase communication between league officials watching from the command center in New York and the referee on the field is a good one. We believe that if quarterbacks can operate with offensive coordinators in their ears between plays, officials can have their work checked by Blandino and chief assistant Alberto Riveron, a former referee, from New York.

It’s not acceptable for Blandino to go on television and radio shows on Monday morning and admit to officiating mistakes, as if the mistakes themselves took 12 hours to analyze. We usually know the right answers as they happen, and it’s time to throw the Steratores and Hochulis of the world a lifeline with a permanent policy of increased in-game communication between the league and officials.

The proposal will allow Blandino or his appointed lieutenant to have a direct line into the ear of officials on the field—to tell them where to spot the football in cases of dispute, or to adjudicate plays that were not under review. The league always says it’s about getting plays right, and if it’s patently obvious that an officiating decision could be corrected, it should be. Also, the eye in New York will potentially cut down on some of the interminable crew conferences on the field. So not only will mistakes presumably decrease, but games might also be shorter.

But let’s go further. As Gruden and Wright argue, the league should allow every play to be challenged—without increasing the number of coaches’ challenges in the game. As much as it would pain the league to adopt an idea originally suggested by Bill Belichick, why make a distinction over which calls are reviewable and which aren’t? If one call per game can be fixed without increasing the number of stoppages, why not do it?

As the screaming headlines over the last 60 years suggest, officiating is never going to be perfect. But by increasing the use of technology that’s already in place and that everyone already sees, the league can help officials and cut down on the public perception that three blind mice are doing most of these NFL games. Surely, it can't hurt.

 

[Prime Time]

http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2015/12/18/nfl-richard-sherman-seattle-seahawks-four-ways-fix-officiating

Richard Sherman’s Four Ways to Fix NFL Officiating
And the one thing he says you should always remember
by Richard Sherman

Robert Beck for Sports Illustrated/The MMQB

In July 2013, the summer after the referee lockout, I invited one of the replacement officials, Lance Easley, to umpire my charity softball game in Seattle.

You’ll remember him as the official who signaled touchdown in the infamous Fail Mary game on Monday Night Football, giving us the win over Green Bay and, ultimately, applying enough pressure on the NFL to bring back the regular officials four weeks into the 2012 season.

Our conversation at the charity event inevitably turned to that Monday night game, and Easley told me about the endless harassment he received afterward from Packers fans, including hate mail and death threats. This was a guy doing the best job he could, under intense scrutiny, on a stage he wasn’t truly prepared for, and fans wanted his head.

These days, as I hear people complain about how we’re at a low point for officiating in the NFL, I think about Easley and the overreaction to a regrettable situation. People actually threatened his life over a game they don’t play or get paid to participate in. To those who blasted Easley, and to the fans who are still losing their minds over bad calls, I have one thing to say:

Relax.

Officiating NFL games is one of the hardest jobs in professional sports, and that’s why the replacement refs were yanked after three weeks. These days, with high-definition TV and rule experts on television and social media, everyone thinks he’s an expert.

Everyone seems to know the rules and how they’re supposed to be called, and everybody can get the call right from the comfort of their own home, lying in bed. But in the heat of the moment, very few of us could get it right, the same way very few viewers can play the game.

That said, I do have some ideas that would make life easier on officials and make for a better game experience—and they don’t include the new measures introduced this week by the NFL.

In allowing for more communication between the league office in New York and the on-field crews during games, the NFL is going about this the wrong way (shocker). If someone like Dean Blandino is trying to remotely micromanage a game from a different state, you run the risk of prolonging an already long game. There will be communication breakdowns, the same way there are communication breakdowns on a regular basis in NFL stadiums between people who are merely hundreds of feet apart.

A certain amount of human error is acceptable. The first thing the league needs to do to improve officiating is narrow the margin for error by simplifying the rulebook, especially on the defensive side of the ball. There’s a great deal of redundancy in our rules that officials end up debating on the field, and these conferences disrupt the flow of the game.

What constitutes illegal contact, and how is it different from pass interference and defensive holding, and how egregious does any of it have to be to constitute unsportsmanlike conduct?

For how many officials there are in the NFL, they do an excellent job of being consistent from one crew to the next on interpreting fouls, but they all make mistakes. Officials become paralyzed by the process of interpretation and it leads to inaccurate calls that leave us shaking our heads days later in the film room. Chopping the rulebook in half will speed up the game and simplify things for the officials.

So that’s No. 1: Simplify the rules.

No. 2: Add an eighth official, and make this position a fulltime job that requires a complex understanding of probably the most complicated rulebook in sports. It makes no sense that at least one person on every crew isn’t committing the same amount of time that the players commit to the game. To improve the quality of anything you have to invest in it.

No. 3: Reconfigure the positions. The most important calls in football, in my opinion, are offensive and defensive pass interference. If you go by yardage alone, they’re the most impactful penalties, and yet the officials who call most of these fouls are standing 20 yards beyond the line of scrimmage, often looking through the backs of defensive players.

Adding an eighth official would allow for two officials to be 20 yards off the ball, and two to be on the sidelines. The two sideline guys would start five yards off the ball and sprint with the receivers down the sideline to get the best perspective of the space between the defensive backs and the receivers. The deep officials, meanwhile, would concentrate on the safety and linebacker play.

With this configuration, you’d eliminate conversations like the one I had with Terry Brown, the field judge in our Nov. 15 game against the Cardinals. I was called for pass interference in the second quarter and when I went to him for an explanation, he said, “I really didn’t see much, but from the way the receiver’s body moved it was a foul.”

Adding another set of eyes and improving the angles will help officials become more certain about their calls and more definitive in their explanations. Which brings me to my fourth and final fix.

No. 4: Improve communication between players and officials. My only complaint about the actual job the officials are doing is the occasional lack of explanation for questionable calls. When they can’t or won’t explain themselves, it becomes difficult to play because you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

I get why some don’t talk. When coaches are screaming at them on a consistent basis, the human element kicks in and guys can shut down. But if you talk to them with respect, they talk to you with respect, and most of the officials will calmly explain a penalty. Yet for some reason, those aren’t the guys you see in the playoffs.

With all that said, I’m ultimately nitpicking. The officials in the NFL are the best and most qualified in the world. Slamming them for doing the best job they can do is almost as ignorant as threatening Mr. Easley’s life over a touchdown. Take a deep breath, and remember: It’s just a game.

 

[jrry32]

Thank you, referee. I bet on the Colts in that one. It sounds like that play is the only reason why they covered.