It’s only been one week and I’m already tired of the National Football League’s replacement officials.
I didn’t think the absence of prominent NFL referees Mike Carey and Ed Hochuli flexing their muscles while pointing for a first down would have such a profound impact.
Then I watched the NFL preseason, where the replacement officials looked more out of place than Tim Tebow at a strip club.
It hasn’t gotten any better in the regular season.
The games are slow. Officials aren’t spotting the ball correctly. Players like Baltimore Ravens’ linebacker Ray Lewis are scaring the new referees to death.
I can’t even count the number of times I saw NFL head coaches lay into the poor fill-ins on the sideline.
Pandemonium has ensued.
Two blatant replacement referee blunders committed in Week 1 shouldn’t have happened.
During a game between the Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals on Sunday, lead referee Bruce Hermansen awarded the Seahawks four timeouts instead of their allotted three.
Seattle used its final timeout after wide receiver Doug Baldwin was injured in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter. But the officials decided an incomplete pass was the cause of the clock stoppage, awarding an extra timeout to the Seahawks.
The referees were wrong.
The NFL rule states that a team must use a timeout for a player’s injury during the last two minutes of the game, if the clock is stopped or not.
In primetime on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, a replacement referee crew led by Gerald Wright botched an NFL rule even the game’s announcers Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth scoffed at.
Broncos’ cornerback Tracy Porter took an interception to the house on a play that started with 2:10 left in the fourth quarter. The play ended with 1:58 remaining in the second half, inside of the two-minute warning.
Officials were supposed to allow the Broncos to attempt the two-point conversion before going to break for the two-minute warning.
That’s not what happened.
Instead of giving Denver a chance to extend its lead before the commercial, the referees called the two-minute warning and stopped play before attempting the two-point conversion.
The mistakes, while inexcusable, might not have been game-changing in Week 1. What if they are in Week 2?
I can’t blame the replacement referees for being out there.
It isn’t their fault that the NFL and the officials’ union can’t come to an agreement on how much the league’s referees should get paid for 60 minutes of work.
That doesn’t mean they should be on the field in the first place.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has known about this problem for a while and hasn’t made enough of an effort to stop it. According to him, the replacement officials are doing a good job.
“Our officials did a more than adequate job last night, and I think that we’ve proven that we can train them and get them up to NFL standards,” Goodell said Thursday at the Bloomberg Sports Business Summit.
Those comments were a day after the NFL season opener between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants. The lead referee for that game was Jim Core.
No big deal.
Core’s just your average eighth grade geography teacher and activities director from Meridian, Id., calling his first ever NFL game with a national television audience watching his every move.
It’s hard to get respect for replacement referees from players, coaches or commentators when it’s so obvious most of them are completely overwhelmed in their environment.
The question is, how long will it take for them to get up to NFL standards?
A week? Seven weeks? Never?
I sure don’t want to wait that long to find out.
