NFL: 7 Rules the League Must Change Now That the Regular Referees Are Back

The initial reaction to the NFL agreeing to terms with the regular referees felt a bit like the ball dropping on New Year's Eve. So long, everything we hated about the past—the new year is finally ready to begin, albeit four weeks late.

As the news settles in and the excitement over something so ridiculous subsides, what we, as fans of the game, are left with is still an enormous list of things that might go wrong when the regular referees return.

Let's not kid ourselves that the regular referees—though markedly better than the overmatched scabs the NFL tried to pass as competent rule enforcers during the lockout—still make mistakes. The regular referees are also joining the season already in progress, without the benefit of a preseason, so it's anyone's guess how long it will take them to get into game shape and up to speed with the pace of play. 

In short, fans should still expect blown calls. These guys aren't robots.

Maybe they should be robots. We joke in Major League Baseball every time an umpire misses a call that robot umpires would make things so much better, so why not give NFL referees every scientific advantage possible—short of making them into actual, sentient robots. 

Here are seven rules the NFL should put in place right now (during this season, if possible) to allow the NFL and its fresh-off-the-couch referees every advantage those of us at home get by watching on TV. If the real goal of the NFL is to get every call right, there is no way the league, the NFLPA or the referees should have any issue with these changes. 

You brought back better referees, NFL. Now help them do the job better, too.

Handle All Replays Upstairs

Since instant replay became a part of NFL games, the league has put the head referee at each game in charge of reviewing questionable plays.

During a coach's challenge, or a call down from the booth during the last two minutes of a half, the head referee walks to the sidelines and steps under a hood that's a cross between a voting booth and a plate camera from the 1850s to determine whether the call should be upheld or overturned.

For decades, the NFL replay process has involved a man hiding underneath a giant sheet.

The college game has since adopted a far more advanced system of replay that allows an extra official in a booth to review all challenges. The official in the booth has the benefit of multiple screens and video technicians sitting with him to give instant replays without needing a clunky headset and privacy curtain.

In addition, the replay official in college does not have to worry about showing up a member of his crew by overturning the call. How many questionable calls have we seen get "confirmed" by the head referee, an act that can only serve to protect one of his guys?

Taking the replay out of the hands of the officials on the field and giving that responsibility to an official upstairs makes too much sense for the NFL not to do this.

Think about how ridiculous the last two minutes of an NFL game have become where someone from upstairs buzzes down to have the head referee go under that hood to review a call. Why doesn't the guy doing the buzzing also handle the review?!? 

Better yet, why doesn't the NFL office handle the review? The NHL has a central office that replays all questionable calls around the league. Why can't the NFL have a referee ombudsman who sits in New York and buzzes to the field when a call is missed, making the official call from the league office so the referees don't have to correct themselves on the field?

This is too simple for the NFL to not be doing this, especially if the goal is to get the calls right.

Make Everything Reviewable

Lost in the aftermath of the Green Bay-Seattle disaster was that some people were caught up in the minutiae of whether the play that decided that game was "reviewable."

Pass interference is not a reviewable call. Simultaneous possession, some decreed, is not a reviewable call, unless it is in the end zone, because every scoring play is now reviewable.

This is ridiculous. Why not make every play reviewable? Why not make every single call on the field subject to review? We have instant replay now. The officials in the booth—or in New York—have the ability to cross-check penalties in a matter of seconds to get calls right. 

I understand the NFL hires referees to get calls right on the field and chaos might ensue if pass interference calls are being overturned, or even called, by a phantom official in the sky, but if the result is getting the calls right, let's create a system where all the calls are right.

This wouldn't even be an issue on 90 percent of the plays in the NFL, but on the egregious calls (or non-calls) that are clearly mistakes on the field, it would be nice for the NFL to reverse them instead of hiding behind an arbitrary line of what calls are or are not reviewable.

The NFL takes so many commercials during games and allows the referees an inordinate amount of time to decide those calls that already come upon further review that any excuse of making the games too long is completely invalid. Nobody will complain about how long the games are if the rules are being properly applied.

Challenges Should Not Count as Timeouts

In an effort to put more strategy and in-game relevance on the coaches' challenges, the NFL has tied the loss of a timeout to getting a challenge wrong.

Penalizing a team for slowing the game down to challenge those calls that are correct has actually been a good rule—in most cases.

What happens when the call is wrong but the official refuses to overturn it? How many times have you heard the TV announcers "clearly" indicate a ball was coming out before a player's knee was down only to hear the head referee decree the exact opposite upon further review?

The point is that these calls are subjective even when they shouldn't be. Allow the coaches two challenges per half without tying those requests to a team's timeouts. This isn't the game show Press Your Luck—(Ooh, the player's knee WAS down and you've stopped on a Whammy! Sorry, you do not get the ball and you lose your final timeout of the game. Oh, and here's a bucket of feathers dumped on your head! We have some lovely parting gifts in the back).

The NFL should let coaches challenge a few plays without penalizing them twice when the referee doesn't see what the rest of the world sees.

Offensive Penalties Should Stop Play Immediately

If a player commits a foul before the ball is snapped, officials run in and stop play immediately.

False-start penalties and encroachment when a defender touches a player or runs unabated to the quarterback will draw immediate whistles.

Other fouls allow play to continue, much like advantage in soccer, giving teams the ability to continue in case the play results in a better outcome for the non-penalized team.

While this makes sense for the offensive team—the idea of a free play when the defense goes offside or times when a receiver is held by the defense but the offense gains more yards with a completion than they would via penalty—it would make sense to whistle a play dead immediately when any foul is committed by the offense. 

Sure, the defense could intercept a pass after an offensive player is called for holding, but if the action was whistled dead at the time of the foul, players could avoid unnecessary hits that occur during plays that end up being called back because of penalties.

How many times have we seen a player run for 15 yards and take a hit—or even score a touchdown—only to have the play called back because of holding? Why not just stop the play when the penalty occurs and save all the players the unneeded collisions? 

This would also limit the ridiculous use of "offsetting penalties" to just dead-ball personal fouls. If a player holds on offense for a 10-yard penalty and a defender pulls down a receiver for pass interference 30 yards downfield, how are those penalties offsetting?

Conversely, if a player gets called for a chop block on the line and another defender comes in and hits the quarterback late, it's hard to swallow the idea of "no harm, no foul" to replay the down, especially when there is the opportunity for harm to be avoided.

Stopping play as soon as an offensive penalty occurs would not only enforce the rules more fairly, it would protect the players better.

Referees Should Give More Penalties for Dissent

This is another rule adopted from soccer, whose officials are berated more than in any other sport. Penalties should be handed out more liberally to players and coaches for dissent.

In soccer, players can receive a yellow card for complaining too angrily to the referee, a move that has immeasurably changed the civility shown toward officials. In the NBA as well, complaining to the referees in a way that attempts to show them up can result in a technical foul.

The NFL has rules in place for touching referees, but they should have a rule in place to penalize players who constantly complain about calls. This goes double for those coaches who treat NFL officials like garbage on the sidelines. It's fine if a coach wants to be a bully to his players, but he should not be allowed to bully the men keeping the game clean. 

The way the NFL coaches treated the replacement officials over the first three weeks of this season was abhorrent and embarrassing. Fining the coaches after the fact is one thing. Penalizing them during the game could change their demeanor immediately.

Eliminate Referee Huddles by Using Smarter Audio Technology

This is not so much a change in the rules as it may be a change in penalty administration, which became a catch phrase during the first three weeks of the season.

Officials spend too much time huddling up to get calls right, a process that slows the game down more than if the referee went over to that stupid review hood to look at the play in the first place.

Half the referees in those huddles end up turning their backs to block players from trying to infiltrate the discussion, with the coordinating officials walking and talking so nobody else on the field can hear what they are saying. It's all so cloak-and-dagger.

The process is even more hilarious when you think about how technology could eliminate these conferences altogether.

If coaches can have headsets to talk to assistants in the booth—if a quarterback can have plays beamed into his helmet—why can't the referees use headsets to talk to each other during the game too?

Again, in soccer, the head referee has wireless radio communication with his assistant referees the entire game, constantly talking about offside calls or fouls the head referee may not have seen. 

Why doesn't the NFL employ this technology? If the officials were all on an open channel to discuss plays as they were happening, it would not only speed up the game by eliminating those ridiculous meetings, it would give officials the ability to talk during plays, all in an effort of getting the calls right. 

Just like the booth review, the NFL needs to give the referees the technological tools to get the calls right and keep the game moving faster. If teenagers can use headsets to coordinate online video games, why can't NFL officials use them to coordinate penalties?

Install Goal-Line and First-Down Technology

I admit that while all the other rules could be instituted as soon as this week, the use of goal-line and first-down technology might take some time.

At what point, though, will the NFL stop trotting out a little chain to determine first downs, all based on the eyesight of an official who is 10 or 15 yards away, staring down a straight line littered with bodies lying in the way? 

How can anyone expect the line judge to get the exact spot right on those calls, which leads to even more time reviewing and challenging the spot on the field? What happens when the video evidence proves inconclusive because there are literally 22 gigantic bodies blocking any reasonable view of whether a ball crossed the line? It doesn't work. 

The NFL, more than any other sport, can benefit from the use of goal-line and first-down technology.

If tennis can use a Hawkeye system that can determine if a ball going more than 125 mph is in or out by a matter of millimeters, the NFL can surely use a system to determine if a ball has crossed a particular boundary that moves the chains—a term that we could happily replace from NFL vernacular. 

Did you know the unofficial first-down marker used by TV is calculated by GPS coordinates? That's not just some guy in a truck painting a line where he thinks the first down will be, there is actual science involved in figuring out where the chains should end. The fact that TV relies on technology while the league relies on a measuring marker placed on the nearest yard line seems utterly ridiculous, doesn't it? 

The NFL needs to develop a ball with sensors just under the skin that can link to a GPS system that determines if a ball is a first down. The technology won't be needed on every play, but instead of trotting out two poles linked by a metal chain, the NFL should use technology to its advantage to make sure every call is right. 

If human error is part of the game, let that come from the players, not the officials. We've got the regular referees back, now let's give them the tools to do their jobs right.