I saw a small blurb in my local newspaper today that the NFL will be hiring up to 17 full-time referees during the offseason!! About freaking time.
It's a good thing, but I don't expect too much effect just from this - what they're apparently talking about is increasing the number of officials on the field from 7 to 8, but it doesn't seem to be the case that the full-time official would have any authority over the referee. To really jump into this requires working through a new CBA.
I also don't see how full-time officials really improve the quality of the calls. You can study NFL film all you want but that doesn't improve the brains capacity to make a split second call when you can't even be sure you didn't blink by accident when the foul occurred. One thing I'd definitely like to see is the officials getting younger and more athletic. The referees now do the best job they possibly can but they all seem physically limited. Of course the younger the guy the more likely of a possible scandal and giving in to temptations of sharks, but still. It pains me when officials aren't in the correct position to make a call because they didn't make it down the field in time to see what happened.
I think that full-time officials would make the calls more consistent from game to game. Too often, I see players called for certain penalties one game and in the next, do the exact same thing (with a different officiating crew) and nothing gets called. At times, at least for me, it appears that the rules are not applied evenly as the system is currently set up. Full-time officials would be drilled over and over so that after a short while, Everything will become automatic and the vagrancies we see in "Judgement Calls" will disappear making the game more enjoyable to watch.
Why wouldn't a full-time official have authority over a part-time referee? That makes no sense imo. For that matter, why wouldn't the full-time officials be the referees?
I'm just going by what Troy Vincent, the league's VP of Football Operations, said. Here is the ESPN.com article: http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/18182219/nfl-plans-hire-17-full-officials-executive-says The last sentence of the story is "Vincent said the league's full-time officials would not supersede the authority of the referee."
It looks like "motion dressed up as action." The addition of "17 full time officials" won't have any realistic effect on the situation. Especially coming out during the middle season-ending stretch run. I smell "damage control." The problem preventing the installation of full time professional officials is that the rich old bastards who run the NFL, who get richer every year from football operations, don't want to pay for it.
