NFL Needs Better-Trained Officials, Not Gimmicky Rule Changes

Next week in Naples, Florida, one of the most powerful cabals in the NFL will gather, a dark and mysterious group that has an immense amount of control over the league.

OK, so the competition committee may not be that nefarious, but it is that powerful. It's the competition committee that considers which rule changes are proposed to the league's teams.

This year, pass interference is a hot topic, and a couple of potential adjustments to that rule are reportedly being kicked around. However, rather than tearing pages out of the NFL rulebook only to replace them with new ones, what the NFL really needs is a properly trained cadre of officials to enforce the rules they already have.

As Dan Hanzus of NFL.com reports, St. Louis Rams head coach Jeff Fisher stated that numerous proposals have been submitted, among them the expansion of instant replay to include penalties:

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A number of those proposals involve including penalties. That will all be discussed. We're just scratching the surface on it now. We'll look at it detail. To comment at this point would be very premature, but that will probably be one of the major topics as we resume our meetings...next week.

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The play that brought this whole brouhaha to the forefront happened in the fourth quarter of last year's Wild Card Game in Dallas between the Detroit Lions and Cowboys.

I'm not about to sit here and argue that the call wasn't mishandled. However, making that play reviewable is only going to solve one problem by creating two more.

Fisher voiced those very concerns to Hanzus:

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You have an on-the-field, full-speed, bang-bang call by the official -- let's say pass interference. Then you're gonna go to replay, and you're gonna go frame by frame by frame whether it is or not. I'm not so sure that's where we want to go with our game right now.

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Meanwhile, NFL executive vice president for football operations Troy Vincent told Judy Battista of NFL.com that he feared allowing one foul to be reviewable could open the proverbial floodgates:

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For a coach to potentially challenge something that was not called, we run the risk of creating fouls. 'Yeah, that was a hold. Yeah, that was an illegal hands to the face.'

We saw 12 different proposals on replay, which means it's something we have to look at, You want to get it right, but you could be creating fouls. And long term, if we start here, you just continue adding year in and year out, and is that what you want? You don't want to go down the road of opening Pandora's Box, and this year it's expanding this, and next year it's expanding that.

We must keep in mind that officials and players are moving at game speed, and those of us who are making decisions on rules have the luxury of slow-motion video. 

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Sure enough, one proposal (submitted by the Lions) would allow for every play of every game to be reviewable.

Would reviewing penalties cut down on bad calls? Possibly, although all you're really doing is substituting the judgment of a slow-motion official in New York for the full-speed judgment of the officials on the field.

Because penalties are just that—judgment calls. Those officials decide whether contact was incidental or interference. Whether that block was a block or a hold.

Frankly, if you follow the black-letter law of the rulebook, there would be about 37 penalties—per play.

Is that what we want, complete with all the official-undermining challenges (some that drag on so long they can be timed with a calendar) that would come with it?

Oh yeah. Good times.

There's also, according to Hanzus, an alternative "compromise" proposal that would change pass interference from a spot foul to a 15-yard penalty, as is the case in college football.

All that compromises is common sense.

There's one simple, glaring reason why the National Football League doesn't have the college game's pass interference rule.

Any defensive back worth his salt who gets beaten deep will just reach out, grab a handful of jersey and take the 15. It's smart football.

In other words, you'd lessen the impact of 40-yard interference calls at the expense of 40-yard pass plays.

Is that what we want?

No, what we want is for the officials to get the calls right, to avoid the sort of game-staining gaffe we saw in Big D. And the best way to do that isn't by reviewing every play like it's the Zapruder film. Or by making it strategically advantageous to mug receivers on deep passes—which will then be reviewed like the Zapruder film.

The best way to improve NFL officiating is to put those officials in a position to succeed.

The dust-up in Dallas didn't happen because an official blew the call itself. You'll find plenty of educated, knowledgeable folks who think Anthony Hitchens committed a foul and just as many more who believe the contact was incidental.

What really got people up in arms wasn't the (non-)call itself so much as the horribly herky-jerk way it was handled. That, in the opinion of Dallas head coach Jason Garrett, was a communication issue, per Dave Birkett of The Detroit Free Press:

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The official who was on the play was on our sideline, he's the one who did not call a penalty there. The call came in from center field and I think typically what happens is those guys communicate before the ball was moved and I think as much as anything else it was a function of they were going to have that communication but they moved the ball first and then the guy who was on top of the play overruled the call and said, 'I saw it, I don't think it was a penalty.' That happens 10 times a game every week in the National Football League.

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The crew in that game was an "all-star" group of officials who were among the highest-graded individuals at their respective spots during the regular season.

Fine idea in theory. In practice, it was a mess, as officials who were unfamiliar with one another were thrown together for a playoff game.

It's also an easy issue to fix. The league's highest-rated crews should work the playoffs. Problem solved. You're welcome.

That's not the biggest step the league needs to take, though.

The fact that the NFL's officials (or at the very least, the league's referees) aren't full-time employees would be laughable if it weren't so sad.

While speaking with ESPN's John Clayton a few years ago, veteran NFL referee Ed Hochuli (yes, the dude with the guns) broke down a typical week in zebra-land:

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It varies a little bit from official to official, depending upon the position. I'm a referee and spend about 15 hours a week reviewing video tape. I look at game tapes which includes the television view, the sideline view and the end zone view from teams. I have to break that down. I get position tapes. For example, the referees will get referee's tapes that show intentional grounding, offensive holding, illegal hits to the quarterback, chop blocks and things like that.

Each official has to take a written test every week during the season and every month in the offseason. I personally spent an hour a day studying rules. Rules in the NFL are extremely complicated. Rules enforcement in the NFL is extremely complicated. We have a case book that has 1,000 plays. I find in order to stay on top of the rules, I read them all the time.

I spent a lot of time on the phone. I have to talk to supervisors three to five times a week involving the grading process of officials. Members of the crew spend a lot of time talking to each other during the week. I'll probably talk to the six other members of my crew at least two or three times during the week to talk about rules interpretation.

I consider my conditioning part of the job. I have to be fit and have to move around. I consider my appearance important. I should look like an athlete on the field, so I spend a couple hours a day on conditioning.

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Mind you, nowhere on that list is game day itself mentioned. Or travel to and from the game. Or the meetings and whatnot that take place leading up to said game.

In addition to all that, officials also hold "day jobs." Now, I'm not an attorney (like Hochuli), but I'm guessing that Hochuli didn't become successful in that regard by working 15 hours a week.

Harry How/Getty Images

I do have a time-consuming occupation (albeit one I love). I've also seen the NFL rulebook, a monolithic testament to the ability of persons with a law degree to make things sound 158 times more complicated than they actually are.

There are also, if I recall correctly, 168 hours in a week regardless of how you make a living.

There just aren't enough hours in the day for NFL officials to do the research and film study to be as good at their jobs as they should be. Because it isn't their job. It's a hobby—a side gig.

And that's ridiculous.

Former NFL director of officiating Mike Pereira, who now works for Fox Sports, echoed that refrain while speaking to The Associated Press' Barry Wilner at the end of a choppy 2013 season for the men in stripes:

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My personal belief is the 17 referees all ought to be full time. They need to explore that notion because having only one full-time referee and umpire and line judge and the others makes no sense. It would not achieve to me what having all 17 full-time refs would, because they should be involved with everything. Be involved in proposals of rules changes and teaching their crews and working with the teams in the offseason.

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There's a thought. Officials whose only job in the offseason is to get better at their job for the upcoming season, just like the players and coaches.

Of course, that would also cost the league money. It's money that the NFL could pull from the cushions of the league's sofa. (ESPN's Darren Rovell reported last July that the league raked in over $6 billion in revenue in 2013, and that number is only going up.)

But as we've seen time and time again from the NFL (including when it locked out the officials in 2012), the NFL is much better at making money than even considering spending it.

Everyone wants to see an NFL where the calls are right. Where flags are thrown when they should be. Where a catch is a catch, and truth, justice and freedom reign supreme. And it's understandable that people want action after at least two of last year's playoff games turned on dubious calls.

However, we aren't going to achieve that laudable goal with more rules. Or by changing the ones we have as a "compromise." Or by undermining the officials charged with enforcing those rules by second-guessing every decision they make.

The best way to ensure the calls are right is to improve the odds that the officials get the call right the first time. And you accomplish this with a full-time corps of professional officials, people whose only professional responsibility lies in doing just that.

Gary Davenport is an NFL Analyst at Bleacher Report and a member of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association and the Pro Football Writers of America. You can follow Gary on Twitter @IDPManor.