LaxRef
03-03-2006, 08:51 AM
I thought this might generate some discussion:
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From http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/5334430
A 10-point plan to make officiating better
Kevin Hench / FOXSports.com
Make no mistake, when both the NFL and Major League Baseball playoffs are tainted by a rash of indefensible calls, the sports world is suffering an officiating crisis.
Does this mean the refs and umps are getting worse? No, but as television coverage gets better and better, their mistakes are just more clearly visible. And, therefore, more clearly correctable.
So why are sports fans being asked to live with bad calls that are costing their teams championships? Surely, something can be done.
Though I'm not above complaining without offering solutions, here are 10 suggestions for leading us all — refs, coaches, fans, commissioners — out of this sad situation.
1. Replay, replay, a thousand times replay!
Sports that don't use replay need to start using it, and sports that use replay need to use more replay. Those TV cameras are our salvation.
Over the course of a baseball season, how many hundreds — possibly thousands - of judgment calls do umpires routinely miss that could be rectified by replay? The most vexing of these is the fair-foul call on home runs down the line. While it can be extremely difficult for an ump looking into a sea of fans to tell on which side of the pole a ball has passed, this is one that replay always shows conclusively. The ball either disappears on one side of the pole or stays visible. This leads to that ridiculous spectacle of managers and umpires engaging in heated, speculative arguments while viewers at home are privy to the right answer. Baseball needs to adopt football's equivalent of the red flag for challenges before a World Series is lost on this call.
Football, meanwhile, needs to open up more replays to review. The big argument against this seems to be slowing down the game, but given that the whole enterprise is designed to sell cars and beer, would the league really care if it had to show more commercials? I've never met a fan who would rather be at the mercy of a bad call than a bad commercial (though I haven't canvassed the people since Diet Pepsi's "Brown and Bubbly" spot). It's just absurd that a coach cannot challenge a game-turning 40-yard pass interference penalty, particularly since PI seems to be the most frequently missed call in football.
After a slew of missed calls on buzzer-beaters in the playoffs a few years back, the NBA finally came to its senses and began subjecting those calls to review. That was a good start, but the league also needs to open up other calls for review. Does any call in sports require as much guesswork as the block-charge decision when a defender's heels are near the restricted area around the basket? Replays show the refs constantly missing this one. It's easily and quickly reviewable and coaches should have the option of throwing the challenge flag — or perhaps the challenge Nerf — when their starting center has just picked up his sixth foul in Game 7 of a playoff series.
The NFL should also abandon its prejudice toward upholding the call on the field. The referee should watch the replay with an open mind, not with a bias toward upholding the suspect call of his back judge. If he's 75 percent sure it was a mistake, he should overturn it. The call on the field — made at full speed with bodies flying around — should not be given any weight once we indulge the luxuries of Super Slo-Mo, zoom and freeze frame.
2. Over-officiating must be punished
Is there anything worse in sports than an official who really wants to put his stamp on the game?
In the Super Bowl, for instance, the stripes seemed to be looking for any reason to throw their flags. How else to explain that call on Matt Hasselbeck for blocking below the waist?
In the NBA, veteran ref Steve Javie often conducts himself as if the 10 phenomenal athletes surrounding him are just there as extras to help him better show off his officiating. He recently ejected Morris Peterson from a game after Peterson and Vince Carter — good friends — exchanged playful slaps. Javie missed Carter's slap, saw Mo-Pete's benign response and did the gravest thing a ref can do: removing a player from the game. It was the worst call of the NBA season, and, sadly, not atypical.
Over-officiating is worse, some would say much worse, in college basketball, where for some idiotic reason, a technical foul counts as personal foul. The combination of this bad rule coupled with a bad call helped give Duke a victory over Florida State a couple of weeks ago. On the plus side, the ACC suspended the offending official, a move that one hopes will deter future over-officiating.
3. Conference calls
While their huddles might not make for thrilling television — as salaried announcers will always remind us — officials more concerned with getting the call right than upholding the mistake of their crewmate is a hugely encouraging sign.
In Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, not once but twice, the umps came together and overruled a bad call with the right one. After Jim Joyce mistakenly ruled Mark Bellhorn's obvious home run a ground-rule double, his fellow blues saved him considerable embarrassment by conferencing and getting the call right. Later, when Randy Marsh was screened on Alex Rodriguez's pathetic slap of Bronson Arroyo and ruled him safe, Joe West stepped in and got the call right. Without these two mistakes being corrected, the Greatest Comeback (and Collapse) in Sports History likely wouldn't have happened.
That's the good news.
The fact that the refs in the Super Bowl couldn't get together and pick up the flag on the embarrassing call on Hasselbeck's tackle is very bad news indeed.
But more and more officials appear to be understanding that overruling your crewmate's erroneous call is having his back not stabbing him in it.
4. Pride goes before a fall
Sports officials need to abandon their egos.
How many times have we seen this sequence? Ref makes bad call, which he immediately suspects is wrong, thereby spiking his insecurity. Player argues bad call. Insecure, embarrassed official compounds his mistake by ejecting player.
This is precisely the scenario that played out in Game 4 of last year's NLCS when plate ump Phil Cuzzi tossed Jim Edmonds after calling a strike on a ball that almost hit Edmonds in the throat. It was a pivotal moment in a 2-1 Cardinals loss that may have cost them the series.
Seriously, guys, just walk away. Again, no one is paying to watch you.
5. Just a little patience
There is this compulsion in sports officiating to make an immediate and decisive call, lest someone doubt the conviction of the ruling. But haste often leads to bad calls, including the dreaded premature "down-by-contact" whistle.
After several years of improvement in this area, the NFL seemed to take a step back this season as more and more plays were blown dead with knees hovering above the ground. Because fumbles can be reviewed and overturned, the officials have been encouraged to hold their whistles as long as possible, but some guys still toot prematurely. What's the rush?
The officials also need to be empowered to do something about this spectacle of teams sprinting to the line of scrimmage — or scrambling the extra point unit onto the field — in hopes of getting the ball snapped before a play can be reviewed. How outright goofy is it that games can come down to how quickly the definitive replay is provided?
In the college football national championship game, the mere fact Texas sent its kicking team barreling onto the field to quickly boot the PAT — which they botched — after the refs missed Vince Young's knee on the ground should have been all the evidence the officials needed to hold things up for 30 seconds while the crew upstairs took a good look at the play.
In baseball, though he may drive announcers crazy with his deliberate style behind the plate, umpire Tim McClelland is a great example of a guy more concerned with being right than fast. Compare his slow, low-key style and accuracy rate to, say, the overzealous theatrics of Eric Gregg in the 1997 NLCS and you'll see how valuable patience can be to a sports official.
6. Anticipation
Anticipation is the trapdoor that officials fall into over and over again. In the NBA, it pretty much explains why superstars get so many calls and rookies are so routinely abused by the refs. When Kobe Bryant drives to the basket against Luther Head, the officials — like the fans — begin to anticipate. The assumption is Kobe will score. When he gets stripped, it messes up the narrative that is playing in the referee's head, and, therefore, must have been a foul.
You see the anticipation-bred error most frequently in transition when officials routinely call fouls on stellar defensive plays because somewhere around midcourt they decided the developing play would surely result in a basket. You see the same thing on roughing the passer calls and hits near the sidelines in football. Once officials begin to anticipate the penalty, even the most innocuous contact gets flagged.
Asking refs to maintain a blank slate in their heads until the moment of decision is a tall order, but if they could do it, it would eradicate a lot of bad calls.
7. Full-time officials
One of the suggestions for improving NFL officiating is making the refs full-time employees. Some have dismissed this idea, asking what exactly the stripes would do for the six months when there are no games.
Uh, practice. Is this too much to ask?
Let's stick them in simulators, put them in film rooms and quiz them constantly. When Pete Morelli goes under the hood in Indianapolis to review Troy Polamalu's interception, he should not be exploring new territory. That six months of off-season — when the rest of us are required to go to work — could be used to study contingencies so that the refs are not caught off guard when it really matters. This would cut down on the number of times the league would have to acknowledge the mistakes of its officiating crews.
Astronaut Mike Mullane made three space flights in 12 years. The rest of the time he was practicing so he'd get it right when it mattered.
8. Bad rules
Not all seemingly bad calls are the fault of the officials. Sometimes they are merely enforcing bad rules. The fact that the Tuck Rule is still on the books after its inanity was so totally exposed in the Patriots-Raiders playoff game four years ago is a disgrace.
Why no team has exploited its obvious loophole is a mystery. According to the rule, all a quarterback would have to do is pump fake at the start of every play, then as long as he never tucks the ball away, he is to be considered in the act of passing for the remainder of the play. Conceivably he could run around for 15 seconds with the ball "untucked" and any fumble would be deemed an incomplete pass. In fact, tucking the ball would be a mistake, since then a fumble would be upheld. Maybe it will take a quarterback pump-faking and then running around with the ball held high with fumble immunity on every play to get the league to fix this obvious glitch.
The same goes for college basketball's stupid rule that a technical is also a personal foul. This shifts way too much control over the outcome away from the players and to the officials. You get a ref with a short fuse, you lose. Ridiculous.
And if a catcher traps or short-hops a third strike, the batter should be out, just like when a first baseman short-hops a throw from an infielder.
Getting rid of bad rules is one simple thing the officials' employers can do to help them out.
9. Physical fitness
Is it just coincidence that Ed Hochuli and Mike Carey never seem to be at the center of one of these officiating imbroglios? I'd love to see the NFL's grading system and check out the correlation between being yoked and being right. (And, yes, I am still angry at doughy Jeff Triplette for his crew's wretched performance in the Patriots' loss to the Broncos, though probably not as mad at him as Orlando Brown will forever be.)
With the aforementioned rotund Eric Gregg (subsequently fired) and lanky Tim McClelland as examples in baseball, I'm guessing we might find some correlation between fitness and accuracy in the national pastime too.
10. Spirit of the law
Okay, we get it, 56 miles per hour is speeding in a 55 zone. But aren't we sick of officials and their leagues using letter-of-the-law arguments to defend decisions when we'd all prefer our sports be governed by a spirit-of-the-law approach?
Baseball's tortured defense of the so-called dropped third strike that cost the Angels Game 2 of the 2005 ALCS was a classic example. Was there a tiny sliver of possibility that the ball had caught some dirt on its way into Josh Paul's mitt? Perhaps. Is that the spirit of the rule? Of course not.
Did Darrell Jackson extend his arm into Chris Hope in the back of the end zone? Yes. Did every veteran NFL analyst find the call hopelessly ticky-tack? Of course. Did Pittsburgh receiver Hines Ward laugh sheepishly when asked about the call? Of course.
Are Seahawks fans laughing? Of course not.
Narrow, picayune rule interpretations lead to hugely unsatisfying results. Penalty flags should be thrown and fouls whistled only when a player has gained an advantage through the infraction. Otherwise we're just watching a bunch of officials showing us they know the rules.
As far as I know, no one wants the officials to determine the outcome of the games. By adapting some or all of these guidelines, sports leagues and the officials who work for them could go a long way to making sure it's the players who decide the final score.
Kevin Hench is the head writer for the Too Late with Adam Carolla show on Comedy Central.
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From http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/5334430
A 10-point plan to make officiating better
Kevin Hench / FOXSports.com
Make no mistake, when both the NFL and Major League Baseball playoffs are tainted by a rash of indefensible calls, the sports world is suffering an officiating crisis.
Does this mean the refs and umps are getting worse? No, but as television coverage gets better and better, their mistakes are just more clearly visible. And, therefore, more clearly correctable.
So why are sports fans being asked to live with bad calls that are costing their teams championships? Surely, something can be done.
Though I'm not above complaining without offering solutions, here are 10 suggestions for leading us all — refs, coaches, fans, commissioners — out of this sad situation.
1. Replay, replay, a thousand times replay!
Sports that don't use replay need to start using it, and sports that use replay need to use more replay. Those TV cameras are our salvation.
Over the course of a baseball season, how many hundreds — possibly thousands - of judgment calls do umpires routinely miss that could be rectified by replay? The most vexing of these is the fair-foul call on home runs down the line. While it can be extremely difficult for an ump looking into a sea of fans to tell on which side of the pole a ball has passed, this is one that replay always shows conclusively. The ball either disappears on one side of the pole or stays visible. This leads to that ridiculous spectacle of managers and umpires engaging in heated, speculative arguments while viewers at home are privy to the right answer. Baseball needs to adopt football's equivalent of the red flag for challenges before a World Series is lost on this call.
Football, meanwhile, needs to open up more replays to review. The big argument against this seems to be slowing down the game, but given that the whole enterprise is designed to sell cars and beer, would the league really care if it had to show more commercials? I've never met a fan who would rather be at the mercy of a bad call than a bad commercial (though I haven't canvassed the people since Diet Pepsi's "Brown and Bubbly" spot). It's just absurd that a coach cannot challenge a game-turning 40-yard pass interference penalty, particularly since PI seems to be the most frequently missed call in football.
After a slew of missed calls on buzzer-beaters in the playoffs a few years back, the NBA finally came to its senses and began subjecting those calls to review. That was a good start, but the league also needs to open up other calls for review. Does any call in sports require as much guesswork as the block-charge decision when a defender's heels are near the restricted area around the basket? Replays show the refs constantly missing this one. It's easily and quickly reviewable and coaches should have the option of throwing the challenge flag — or perhaps the challenge Nerf — when their starting center has just picked up his sixth foul in Game 7 of a playoff series.
The NFL should also abandon its prejudice toward upholding the call on the field. The referee should watch the replay with an open mind, not with a bias toward upholding the suspect call of his back judge. If he's 75 percent sure it was a mistake, he should overturn it. The call on the field — made at full speed with bodies flying around — should not be given any weight once we indulge the luxuries of Super Slo-Mo, zoom and freeze frame.
2. Over-officiating must be punished
Is there anything worse in sports than an official who really wants to put his stamp on the game?
In the Super Bowl, for instance, the stripes seemed to be looking for any reason to throw their flags. How else to explain that call on Matt Hasselbeck for blocking below the waist?
In the NBA, veteran ref Steve Javie often conducts himself as if the 10 phenomenal athletes surrounding him are just there as extras to help him better show off his officiating. He recently ejected Morris Peterson from a game after Peterson and Vince Carter — good friends — exchanged playful slaps. Javie missed Carter's slap, saw Mo-Pete's benign response and did the gravest thing a ref can do: removing a player from the game. It was the worst call of the NBA season, and, sadly, not atypical.
Over-officiating is worse, some would say much worse, in college basketball, where for some idiotic reason, a technical foul counts as personal foul. The combination of this bad rule coupled with a bad call helped give Duke a victory over Florida State a couple of weeks ago. On the plus side, the ACC suspended the offending official, a move that one hopes will deter future over-officiating.
3. Conference calls
While their huddles might not make for thrilling television — as salaried announcers will always remind us — officials more concerned with getting the call right than upholding the mistake of their crewmate is a hugely encouraging sign.
In Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, not once but twice, the umps came together and overruled a bad call with the right one. After Jim Joyce mistakenly ruled Mark Bellhorn's obvious home run a ground-rule double, his fellow blues saved him considerable embarrassment by conferencing and getting the call right. Later, when Randy Marsh was screened on Alex Rodriguez's pathetic slap of Bronson Arroyo and ruled him safe, Joe West stepped in and got the call right. Without these two mistakes being corrected, the Greatest Comeback (and Collapse) in Sports History likely wouldn't have happened.
That's the good news.
The fact that the refs in the Super Bowl couldn't get together and pick up the flag on the embarrassing call on Hasselbeck's tackle is very bad news indeed.
But more and more officials appear to be understanding that overruling your crewmate's erroneous call is having his back not stabbing him in it.
4. Pride goes before a fall
Sports officials need to abandon their egos.
How many times have we seen this sequence? Ref makes bad call, which he immediately suspects is wrong, thereby spiking his insecurity. Player argues bad call. Insecure, embarrassed official compounds his mistake by ejecting player.
This is precisely the scenario that played out in Game 4 of last year's NLCS when plate ump Phil Cuzzi tossed Jim Edmonds after calling a strike on a ball that almost hit Edmonds in the throat. It was a pivotal moment in a 2-1 Cardinals loss that may have cost them the series.
Seriously, guys, just walk away. Again, no one is paying to watch you.
5. Just a little patience
There is this compulsion in sports officiating to make an immediate and decisive call, lest someone doubt the conviction of the ruling. But haste often leads to bad calls, including the dreaded premature "down-by-contact" whistle.
After several years of improvement in this area, the NFL seemed to take a step back this season as more and more plays were blown dead with knees hovering above the ground. Because fumbles can be reviewed and overturned, the officials have been encouraged to hold their whistles as long as possible, but some guys still toot prematurely. What's the rush?
The officials also need to be empowered to do something about this spectacle of teams sprinting to the line of scrimmage — or scrambling the extra point unit onto the field — in hopes of getting the ball snapped before a play can be reviewed. How outright goofy is it that games can come down to how quickly the definitive replay is provided?
In the college football national championship game, the mere fact Texas sent its kicking team barreling onto the field to quickly boot the PAT — which they botched — after the refs missed Vince Young's knee on the ground should have been all the evidence the officials needed to hold things up for 30 seconds while the crew upstairs took a good look at the play.
In baseball, though he may drive announcers crazy with his deliberate style behind the plate, umpire Tim McClelland is a great example of a guy more concerned with being right than fast. Compare his slow, low-key style and accuracy rate to, say, the overzealous theatrics of Eric Gregg in the 1997 NLCS and you'll see how valuable patience can be to a sports official.
6. Anticipation
Anticipation is the trapdoor that officials fall into over and over again. In the NBA, it pretty much explains why superstars get so many calls and rookies are so routinely abused by the refs. When Kobe Bryant drives to the basket against Luther Head, the officials — like the fans — begin to anticipate. The assumption is Kobe will score. When he gets stripped, it messes up the narrative that is playing in the referee's head, and, therefore, must have been a foul.
You see the anticipation-bred error most frequently in transition when officials routinely call fouls on stellar defensive plays because somewhere around midcourt they decided the developing play would surely result in a basket. You see the same thing on roughing the passer calls and hits near the sidelines in football. Once officials begin to anticipate the penalty, even the most innocuous contact gets flagged.
Asking refs to maintain a blank slate in their heads until the moment of decision is a tall order, but if they could do it, it would eradicate a lot of bad calls.
7. Full-time officials
One of the suggestions for improving NFL officiating is making the refs full-time employees. Some have dismissed this idea, asking what exactly the stripes would do for the six months when there are no games.
Uh, practice. Is this too much to ask?
Let's stick them in simulators, put them in film rooms and quiz them constantly. When Pete Morelli goes under the hood in Indianapolis to review Troy Polamalu's interception, he should not be exploring new territory. That six months of off-season — when the rest of us are required to go to work — could be used to study contingencies so that the refs are not caught off guard when it really matters. This would cut down on the number of times the league would have to acknowledge the mistakes of its officiating crews.
Astronaut Mike Mullane made three space flights in 12 years. The rest of the time he was practicing so he'd get it right when it mattered.
8. Bad rules
Not all seemingly bad calls are the fault of the officials. Sometimes they are merely enforcing bad rules. The fact that the Tuck Rule is still on the books after its inanity was so totally exposed in the Patriots-Raiders playoff game four years ago is a disgrace.
Why no team has exploited its obvious loophole is a mystery. According to the rule, all a quarterback would have to do is pump fake at the start of every play, then as long as he never tucks the ball away, he is to be considered in the act of passing for the remainder of the play. Conceivably he could run around for 15 seconds with the ball "untucked" and any fumble would be deemed an incomplete pass. In fact, tucking the ball would be a mistake, since then a fumble would be upheld. Maybe it will take a quarterback pump-faking and then running around with the ball held high with fumble immunity on every play to get the league to fix this obvious glitch.
The same goes for college basketball's stupid rule that a technical is also a personal foul. This shifts way too much control over the outcome away from the players and to the officials. You get a ref with a short fuse, you lose. Ridiculous.
And if a catcher traps or short-hops a third strike, the batter should be out, just like when a first baseman short-hops a throw from an infielder.
Getting rid of bad rules is one simple thing the officials' employers can do to help them out.
9. Physical fitness
Is it just coincidence that Ed Hochuli and Mike Carey never seem to be at the center of one of these officiating imbroglios? I'd love to see the NFL's grading system and check out the correlation between being yoked and being right. (And, yes, I am still angry at doughy Jeff Triplette for his crew's wretched performance in the Patriots' loss to the Broncos, though probably not as mad at him as Orlando Brown will forever be.)
With the aforementioned rotund Eric Gregg (subsequently fired) and lanky Tim McClelland as examples in baseball, I'm guessing we might find some correlation between fitness and accuracy in the national pastime too.
10. Spirit of the law
Okay, we get it, 56 miles per hour is speeding in a 55 zone. But aren't we sick of officials and their leagues using letter-of-the-law arguments to defend decisions when we'd all prefer our sports be governed by a spirit-of-the-law approach?
Baseball's tortured defense of the so-called dropped third strike that cost the Angels Game 2 of the 2005 ALCS was a classic example. Was there a tiny sliver of possibility that the ball had caught some dirt on its way into Josh Paul's mitt? Perhaps. Is that the spirit of the rule? Of course not.
Did Darrell Jackson extend his arm into Chris Hope in the back of the end zone? Yes. Did every veteran NFL analyst find the call hopelessly ticky-tack? Of course. Did Pittsburgh receiver Hines Ward laugh sheepishly when asked about the call? Of course.
Are Seahawks fans laughing? Of course not.
Narrow, picayune rule interpretations lead to hugely unsatisfying results. Penalty flags should be thrown and fouls whistled only when a player has gained an advantage through the infraction. Otherwise we're just watching a bunch of officials showing us they know the rules.
As far as I know, no one wants the officials to determine the outcome of the games. By adapting some or all of these guidelines, sports leagues and the officials who work for them could go a long way to making sure it's the players who decide the final score.
Kevin Hench is the head writer for the Too Late with Adam Carolla show on Comedy Central.
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