Officials in the New Age Game

Football officials...the men on the field we all complain about and love to hate. But without these keepers of the rules, a football game could not progress with any sort of structure or sanity.

Officials play a very important role in the game, from keeping the game rolling along and calling penalties when a rule is broken, to making sure the athletes don't unnecessarily hurt each other. Officials are responsible for monitoring the game clock and play clock, enforcing the rules of the game, and recording all rule infractions.

That is what an official is supposed to be like. However, this seems to be lacking this year with college officials. Or is it?

Being an official is harder now than what it used to be.

Now, officials are cited even more for a blown call because of a replay. Before replay, fans could only go by what the official said on the field. But, that is no longer the case in today’s game.

Officials now either wait to make a call because they know that the replay will make the call for them, or they don’t make the call at all.

Replay is completely taking the human element out of the game. Officials are afraid to make a call on the field because they don’t want the replay to show that they are wrong.

How can an official see every play? They can’t, they are going to miss some, that’s called being human.

Another reason why officials are under fire is because of their importance in the game. I’m not saying that officials fix games, because I don’t think they do. I think it’s more that the conferences that the officials work for make the matter worse.

The conferences use ratings on every crew. They should give the crews with higher scores the bigger games.

Another repair would be to rid of conference officials.

Officials should not be restricted to just one conference; that way you can’t blame them by saying those officials are helping a team win because they belong to that conference.

One more thing that football should do is to have the official that made the call talk with the replay man. That way, the replay man can get a sense on what the guy on the field saw. How does the referee know what happened when he probably didn’t even see it himself?

One thing that the public can do is not blame it all on the man who made the call on the field. He sees the play live, he doesn’t have the ability to slow the play down and look at it from different angles.

The only people who have that ability are the replay man and us. If you have to blame it on somebody, then blame the replay man.

I’m not here trying to defend officials, because they also have to take some blame. All I’m saying is that replay is making it harder than ever on the officials now.  

But, I am also in favor of replay, because like any other fan, I want the call to be right. It’s just not fair that the men on the field get the blame and everybody else gets off free.