Questionable NFL officials?

[Jayworld]

I guess my bias is more toward the officiating, in any sport, as I grew up in an officiating family (my father was a college football official for over 20 years), so I have been exposed to hundreds of in-person games and have seen good officiating and bad officiating. Usually the bad officials are vetted out for their performance by not getting a schedule from their conference for the next year. It is always a year-to-year deal. It still irritates me to hear, see, or read someone criticizing officials without knowledge of the game rules. It's easy for all of us to be "arm-chair officials." Unfortunately, many television viewers rely on the commentary of the play-by-play and color commentators who (in most instances) have very rudimentary knowledge of the rules and thus can present a biased ignorant viewpoint of the rule or rules in question. Dan Dierdorf and Brent Musburger are two commentators that rarely knew or understood the rules. In Dierdorf's situation, it was ignorance; in Musburger's, it was ego.

Officials have to undergo rigorous training, both physical and mental, and in the case of college officials, the crew arrives 5+ hours prior to game time in the stadium to have a "pre-game," which is actually a "skull session," in which the crew goes over the rules and discusses just about every type of scenario that MAY happen in the upcoming game based upon plays run by the opposing teams, including trick plays. Plus, the Referee and Umpire visit each team dressing room prior to the game to meet with the coaches, meet the captains, and discuss with the coaching any possible trick plays to be on the alert for. This is important for two reasons:

1. The coach determines from the Referee and Umpire if the proposed trick play(s) is legal
2. The officiating crew is aware of such a play in case it occurs in the game so that the right call can be made.

Officials train themselves both individually and within the crew to be at the right place at the right time to give the best call in any scenario and also depend on their crew mates for help in cases where vision is blocked, the official is out of position (in many cases, because an official has been knocked to the ground, etc.).

Having said all this, it seems the NFL rules committee complicates things more and more each year with new rules, new interpretations of rules, etc. The officials are paid to enforce the rules that the rules committee comes up with. 30 years ago or so, the better college officials (those that continually graded out at the top in their positions) stayed in the college game and those that graded out lesser went to the pros, in many cases. In one particular case, an outstanding college official went to the NFL for a couple of seasons, did not like the experience, and returned to the college ranks.

NFL officials live all over the country; therefore, crews are made up of men that live in different geographic locations and the fellowship just does not exist in the same was as the college game. For example, Big 12 officials are generally from the same geographic region as the teams, so in many cases the officials can see each other or meet to discuss officiating much easier than an NFL crew, who often times see each other only once a week for the game. Before all the re-alignment in the conferences in college, many of the college were even more geographically located and thus the officiating crews were even closer; i.e old Southwest Conference.

Also, in many cases, those that are instant replay officials may come from the following ranks:
1. Former NFL official
2. Former college official that was not good enough to get to the NFL
3. League representative with officiating knowledge and rules knowledge
4. Former retired college official
In each case, the person has studied and has been trained on the NFL rules.