The NFL has an officiating problem. It’s time for the NFL to solve it.
And by the NFL, I don’t mean the league office. I mean the owners.
It’s their game. Their sport. They’ve made and are maintaining billion-dollar investments in the sport. They are the sport. The entire concept of a league office with a Commissioner to do their bidding provides a Big Shield that the owners individually can hide behind.
It’s time to stop hiding. The officiating will improve only if the owners take charge of the process.
It’s not a problem with officials, per se. The middle-aged men and women who do the job are doing the best they can while maneuvering through and around the gladiators without the benefit of pads or helmets. Things happen at lightning speed, and the officials make the best naked-eye, real-time judgments they can.
There are examples every week. On Sunday night, multiple examples of horrible calls happened on the final drive of the game, from a horrible unnecessary roughness call for a hit on Patrick Mahomes to a horrible non-call of pass interference to the latest application of a non-existent Hail Mary exception to the pass interference rules.
The officiating function needs to be dismantled and reimagined. In late October, we listed five reasons why the NFL won’t do it: (1) cheapness; (2) laziness; (3) ineptness; (4) controversy sells; and (5) the absence of any urgency to change.
The urgency will arrive when Congress makes it arrive. Those who regard that take as chicken-little fan fiction either have forgotten, or never learned about, the October 2009 Congressional hearing. In that session, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith learned that, if pro football didn’t clean up its mess regarding head trauma, Congress would do it.
The hearing sparked a revolution in player safety that still continues. If/when Congress does the same thing when it comes to gambling, with an emphasis on piss-poor officiating practices, the league will do the same thing.
It becomes tempting to just wait for the cage to be rattled. That’s not good for the game. For the integrity of the game. That term gets cited whenever the league office wants to protect it by punishing someone. It never gets mentioned as an aspiration, as a goal.
It should be. It’s not a catch phrase to justify suspension or termination. It’s a mission statement. When it comes to officiating, the mission is failing.
As one head coach explained it to PFT on Monday, It’s "[t]ime for owners to act on officiating.” The coach suggested removing Goodell, Competition Committee chairperson Rich McKay, and NFL executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent from the equation entirely.
The coach also agrees that the league should “completely overhaul” the officiating process. For multiple years, I’ve said it needs to be torn down and rebuilt in light of all available technologies.
What the NFL needs to do — and what it will never do — is call Fox Sports rules analyst (and former NFL senior V.P. of officiating) Dean Blandino and ask him to name his price. Blandino himself has said that the league doesn’t properly value the V.P. of officiating position. It’s critical to the long-term success of the league and the short-term integrity of the game.
What would it take? What should it take? Given the importance of the job to the NFL, and in light of all the gambling money that the league is currently stuffing into its pockets, $10 million per year would be a fair price to pay to fix the officiating function.
The inevitable scandal if major changes don’t happen will cost a lot more than that.