On Monday, I got an unsolicited text from an NFL head coach who believes that it’s time for NFL owners to take control of solving the ongoing issues with officiating.
On Tuesday, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones made the first of his two weekly appearances on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. The hosts asked him about our item, with the specific question of what the owners can do to improve officiating.
Jerry’s answer misses the point. Perhaps deliberately.
“I must have been in a fog for the last 30 years, but any meaningful rule change that I’ve ever seen in any major issue no matter defensively, offensive, passing game, running game, the owners approved it,” Jones said. “So I didn’t realize that we won’t approve officiating. And I know we’re paying them, the people that are officiating. That is our money.”
Reminded that his own concerns about officiating once manifested themselves in a blind referee Halloween costume, Jones continued.
“i recognize the challenge, and let me tell you this,” Jones said. “Instant replay puts a lot of pressure on making the call on the field right, as it should be. I like it. But the officiating is a part of the game.”
He then told a story about baseball umpires that, frankly, I didn’t quite understand. He then continued to address the point at hand.
“We know there’s judgment,” Jones said. “And we know it can be wrong. And, really, is wrong a lot. The idea of getting it ‘right,’ quote, with all that’s at stake. It can be right, if you all agree that we’re gonna go on that guy’s judgment. Now he may be half blind, but we’ve decided that we’re gonna go on his judgment. We both agreed to it coming in. And we assume that his integrity is OK and good, so it’s just a question of did he miss it or not. I think we’ve always lived with that.”
It’s one thing for the two teams involved to live with that. It’s quite another for the people who are wagering their money legally on gambling to live with it. They haven’t agreed to accept mistakes that are avoidable, even if the teams in a given game have.
The problem here isn’t the process for making the rules, which the owners undoubtedly control, or the manner in which the judgment is exercised. The problem is the reliance on outdated methods for eliminating the guesswork employed by middle-aged officials who lack pads or other protection from getting trampled by players and who are trying to discern the right answers with naked eyes operating in a blur of large, fast athletes.
The point is that the entire function needs to be torn down and rebuilt. The point is that no one in the league office has the incentive to do it. The point is that the owners need to issue a mandate to the league office to reimagine officiating, using the appropriate resources and effort to come up with a modern way to get the calls right, and to ensure that the best possible judgment is being exercised.
For the owners, it all comes back to the dollars involved. As Jones said, “That is our money.” They need to be willing to spend enough of it. They need to be willing to spend a lot of it. Perhaps starting with paying Dean Blandino to come back to the NFL and to preside over the critical process of coming up with a better way to officiate games.
The advent of legalized gambling eliminates the “shit happens and hopefully the shit evens out over time” excuse. There’s an obligation to the stewards of the game to find a way to get it right, for themselves and for everyone else.
There’s currently no incentive to spend the money necessary to get it right all the time, because the owners believe there’s no obvious upside for doing it — and that there’s no obvious downside for not doing it.
Ultimately, it requires creative thought. It requires the kind of proactive approach the league rarely applies. The approach is to cling to the status quo, keep on counting the money, keep on spending as little of it as possible, and make significant changes only when there’s no choice but to do so.
The downside should be obvious. It’s hiding in plain sight. The NFL fought aggressively against legalized gambling due to concerns that, if gambling happens freely and legally, bad calls will be regarded not as accidental but intentional. The fix is in. I’m hearing that more and more and more from the fans of the game.
The league either doesn’t hear it, or the league doesn’t care. Jerry either doesn’t hear it, or he doesn’t care. They’re also content to wait for someone (like Congress) to make them improve officiating, regardless of the drip-drip-drip of damage done to the game by bad calls that make more and more people think something nefarious is happening.
An epiphany is needed. Some within the broader structure of the game know it. Those who control the flow of cash necessary to make real changes don’t.
And that’s happening either because they’re oblivious to it — or because they don’t want to spend the money, because they don’t think they need to spend the money.