SEC's Officiating Morass Gets Deeper, But the Next Steps Are Simple, Not Nuclear

I don’t understand why they don’t put a computer strip inside the football.  Place sensors along the sidelines and you would have exact precision on markage.  You would have without a doubt evidence of ball location.

I couldn’t agree more with SailorGabe’s idea, I’ve said for two years now that an RFID or small transmitter on the inside curl stitching on either end of a football would eliminate a LOT of the errors in football games.  Most importantly crossing the goal line and spotting the ball on both forward progress and for down marking in a large pile.

This accountability and extra oversite is long over due for Conference officiating.

Replay is a great technology—-but it can only be used today for certain plays on the field—-like was it a catch?—in bounds?—fumble?

My suggestion is  like yours is that Official’s yellow flag penalties be open to review and being overturned just like "possession" type plays are reviewed every week.

My second suggestion is removing inter-conference refs (SEC-Big Ten-PAC10 etc) from these games or having split teams of officials from another conference making the calls—

From my viewing of games-there is way too much "let’s invent a major penalty" late in the game to keep our conference’s top ranked team from losing this game type behaviour going on—-and it’s happens in a lot of different conferences.

Florida for two weeks in a row has remained unbeaten (on track for a possible BCS National Championship Game) by the results of wrong officiating calls—deliberate or innocent—but the critical results are two big wins for Florida.

The SEC officials were suspeneded for the Arkansas-UF game last week—and they were the same guys who flagged the "excessive celebration" call in the UGA game that impacted the outcome for LSU to win as well.

That makes three weeks in a row that the SEC officials have influenced a game in favor of it’s two highly ranked teams—Florida and LSU—-

Alabama won a squeeker versus Tennessee by 12-10 and who knows if there were any suspicious calls involved there as well—maybe there was?

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/football/ncaa/10/25/kiffin.tennessee.ap/index.html

Do you see where all of this leads?

At some point, no one trusts the officiating any of these games any more (kind of like some Latin American Soccer Matches) or we are wondering why certain teams consistantly seem to end up in BCS games—having "won" close games that they may have easily lost except for some timely yellow flags that bounced their way.

Yes—-these programs are all great squads—but the officials can help to make them "unbeatable" in close games.

We need to eliminate or reduce these opportunities to steer a game’s outcomes by officials by replay reviewing their "yellow flags" and even removing them with entirely by using different conference officials from a "neutral" non BCS conference—like the MAC—Mountain West—C-USA etc

Does anyone remember Colorado’s 5th down ?  Or Nebraska’s "kick the ball to the receiver" ?  Did the mysterious black helicopters move from Missouri games to the SEC  ?

I like the idea of hiring full-time officials too.  The SEC could spend some of 2.25 billion that ESPN paid to broadcast SEC athletics. http://www.allbusiness.com/entertainment-arts/broadcasting-industry/12153963-1.html  This money is on top of the 55 million that CBS pays yearly for broadcasting the premiere football game of the conference.  http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/article/59762

Since "the SEC is the gold standard in college athletics" (so states Mike Aresco, Executive Vice President, Programming, CBS Sports) I think that the SEC has an opportunity to improve the quality of officiating across the NCAA, by implementing a program that includes full time officials.  Other conferences will follow the example.  The timing is right.  Mike Slive (Mr. We Don’t Publicly Hang Refs in The Square, But We Really Do)  has the chance to be a leader.  Just do it.

I do not get why these officials aren’t highly paid professionals.  There is so much money in football, you’d think the men in stripes would be making a fortune.  Throw some money at the situation, attract some talent.  Make pay commensurate to officiating performance on the field.

What you folks don’t seem to understand is that these officials did not "blow" ANY calls. They are not that lousy at what they do. They have done EXACTLY what they were directed to do, by those who are in control of the situation.

So you think to yourself, well, they wouldn’t be too happy about being thrown under the bus for doing as they’d been ordered, right? They might even get a little mad at that, and maybe spill some beans, wouldn’t they?

Wrong.

Remember, these officials have families that they have to think about. I’m not talking about money; most of them have well-paying jobs. I’m talking about their safety and well-being. Not to mention, of course, that a nice little bit of financial remuneration that no one will ever trace goes a long way in ensuring that they "play ball".

Think I’m joking, or even exaggerating?

Then you have NO idea what big-time college football has become.

The problem isn’t the refs, who have "blown" calls every game since football was invented.  It’s the 7 replays from every angle that allow everyone to second guess a split second decision in the heat of the moment.  Too much is expected of a role that now involves zero margin for error although some of the calls are inherently subjective (personal fouls, pass interference) and made by HUMAN FRICKIN’ BEINGS actually on the field.  The logical conclusion of this weekly ref-bashing is going to be a system where they just run the play and the refs watch videos from 7 angles afterward to see if there’s any type of infraction before the next play is run.  Hope ya’ll enjoy it.  I won’t be watching it.

Full-time officials who answer to the NCAA, not the conferences.
Goal-line cameras.
Coach’s challenge system instead of supposedly reviewing every play. I would go with a hybrid of the NCAA and NFL systems. Officials automatically review all goal-line calls. Everything else is a challenge situation. Maybe 3 or 4 per game for each coach, and if they win a challenge, they keep it.

Just like it’s almost impossible for quarterbacks to have a "perfect" game (even Simms in the Superbowl missed on 10% of his passes), it’s next to impossible for officials to have perfect games.  EVERYONE who is involved in football at all knows this.  That’s one reason coaches and players can be disciplined for criticizing officials.

The problem here is that the SEC Commissioner, in a moment of extreme mental constipation coupled with verbal diarrhea, ignored his common sense his own rules (which apparently don’t apply to him) and effectively declared war on his own officials.  He thereby also gave his college coaches and presidents a de facto license to do the same, and gave a "cause celebre of the month" to sportswriters desparate for something to write about midseason.  And in doing so, he has alienated a group of people whose tacit support he needs (the officials) and has publicly called into question the quality of his own product (SEC games).

There may be some things that can be done during the offseason – the article has several suggestions.  But it’s an execrable exercise in stupidity to start the process by gunning down your own referees. 

X

The first step in improving SEC officiating is to fire the biased, hypocritical Mike Slive. Then, maybe the officiating corps would get a much-needed shakeout. After that, maybe all the schools in the conference would get a fair shake.

The officitaitng is not the problem. The problem goes deeper than that. You want to investigate? You want to purge and start over? You want more qualified people who care about the integrity of the game?

You better start at the top within the NCAA Executive offices and every Executive office for all 6 of the BCS conferences for that matter. The system had been corrupted from the inside out. Now that it has reached the surface is why we can all finally start seeing it.