Good Luck SEC Officials, 2010 Won't Get Any Easier

SEC referees were a hot topic last year. Every year produces a number of questionable calls throughout the country, but can 2009 ever be topped?

There are too many to list that could be discussed at length. Most of this hype comes from our obsession over the game of football, and the fact games are recorded live with what seems to be 100 cameras at every angle.

How can we not get upset when you can clearly see a foot hit the green instead of the white? How can we not get angry when the ball clearly didn’t cross the plain? Ah, the joy and pain of being a fan of an SEC team.

I appreciate the stance Nick Saban took in regards to the performance of referees, particularly when it came to how the SEC responded. He even seemed to question, jokingly of course, the sanity of these gentlemen for choosing such a profession.

There were times refs deserved to be disciplined, specifically the crew officiating the Georgia-LSU game where AJ Green was flagged for excessive celebrating, as well as the Florida-Arkansas game where phantom calls were being made that clearly shifted the outcome of that game.

I definitely got frustrated during a few Alabama games, as it seemed the refs looked the other way numerous times on blatant holding calls.

I understand Terrance Cody is a relatively large human being, but I don’t think the rulebook allows holding if the other player is bigger. What makes this outrageous is teams routinely sent two or three players to block him. That means not one, but two or more players were holding him on any given play.

Meanwhile, Alabama’s offensive line wasn’t called for holding during the entire second half of the season. That’s not a fluke, ladies and gentlemen, that’s called coaching.

The same could be said for Julio Jones.

One look at him and you can see he is physically overwhelming for most defensive backs, but how many occasions was he being held or interfered with in the end zone on a ball going straight up in the air? The only advantage the defense has is to hold him, which happened plenty. But how many calls were generated? The red zone efficiency last year can answer that question.

At the very least it will be interesting to see what happens throughout the 2010 season. The level of scrutiny will only grow with the popularity of college football. I don’t believe we’ll see another AJ Green catastrophe this year, but you will continue to see more and more arguable plays that even the replay system can’t seem to determine.

And I realize the craziness of that last sentence even as I typed it. The pressure to be an SEC official is unreal. Let’s hope for the sake of the league, and college football, that we as fans “under-expect” and the officials “over-deliver.”