Are SEC Officials Trained Properly to be Fair to Spread Offenses?

First off, I would like to say that this is not an article intended to bash the SEC or its officials.

It is an article intended to bring a problem out in the open so that it might be properly addressed. While some might disagree, they would be wrong as the evidence is irrefutable. 

While watching some SEC games from the 2009 season, to get a leg up on offensive lines for 2010, I noticed some terrible calls. The were not just bad, they were obviously, blindly wrong and the official was often out of place to properly make the call.

That encouraged me to look harder as I was going through teams. I then noticed another trend. SEC officials are flag—happy and often wrong when officiating spread offenses. There is evidence to prove my statement without having to look at hours of video.

If you choose to do so, you can follow this link to the SEC statistics page for the 2009 season. Scroll down to penalties and take a look. The five least penalized teams run some form of conventional offense. Most of the rest run some form of the spread offense. Penalized teams

I will say the statistics do not show how bad the disparity is. In one game where a conventional offense was not called for a single holding penalty, there were seven obvious missed calls. We expect them to miss some, but not quite that many.

There were repeated illegal formation calls against spread offenses that I spent hours trying to find fault with looking at the rules. The line judge called illegal motion on spread offenses at a much higher rate than they did conventional offenses.

It looked to me as if it was a borderline call and a spread offense, the call was made. If it was a conventional offense, the call was only sometimes made.

In several of the circumstances the official was out of position to see what they were calling. In two games I saw what appeared to be illegal pick plays run by one team. There was no call in either circumstance. This was a conventional offense.

SEC teams were penalized for 7275 yards in 2009. This is an average of 606 yds per team for the season. This compares to 577 yards per team in the Big 10. This is what you would expect. Spread offenses are called for penalties about equally in the Big 10. 

This would lead me to a conclusion that either SEC teams that run the spread offense are more prone to mistakes than Big 10 teams or the SEC officials are simply not doing right by spread offenses.

Let us hope that Mike Slive and the SEC are on top of this. Let us hope the officials are trained properly to call football games properly in 2010. There needs to be officials to match the quality of the teams they are officiating. SEC officials should unquestionably be the best in college football. Nothing less is acceptable.