Nationalizing officiating would lessen errors, conspiracy theories
This has been a tough season for the men in striped shirts.
Games featuring SEC, Pac-10 and Big Ten contenders have produced highly publicized blown calls, and in turn ample fodder for every conspiracy theorist with a blog, press pass, Twitter account or access to a message board.
David Parry has seen the other side of those calls. Now the national coordinator for College Football Officiating (CFO), Parry spent 19 years as a ref in the Big Ten. He recalls sitting in the locker room with his crew after games, fellow refs close to tears over a blown call. He remembers phone calls days later, colleagues unable to sleep knowing their misjudgment had altered the course of a game, and maybe a season.
"That's what they remember and that's what haunts them," Parry said. "That's kind of the irony of football officiating, or all officiating: you're remembered pretty much by your mistakes, not the ones that you get right. Unfortunately, that's kind of the world we live in."
This season, several bad calls in close, high-profile games have put the spotlight squarely on officials. But as Parry knows, the bad calls are only part of the problem, and the punishments for those calls -- be it the SEC suspending the Arkansas-Florida crew, or announcing it would fine or suspend coaches who criticized officials -- are only bandages.
The real answer may lie in nationalizing and standardizing college football officiating.
Human error will always be a part of the game, but Parry and CFO are attempting to introduce a national governing body that would level the field.
"It would take the label off the back of the officials," Parry said. "So therefore [no one] would say 'This is an SEC crew and we'd bombard the SEC with our complaints.' It would give more neutrality instead of saying they belong to a particular conference and officiate a certain way or have a certain agenda."
Parry is working with the commissioners from each of the FBS conferences, two FCS conferences and NCAA executives to develop national standards for interpretation and officiating mechanics and to change how officials are matched, assigned to games and evaluated.
Currently, individual conferences govern and assign officials to games; that's why, two weeks after the LSU-Georgia controversy, the same crew created further headaches in the Arkansas-Florida game. Eventually, the crew's work came back to haunt it, and it was suspended. Under the current system, each crew member receives a grade for accuracy, and those who score too low don't earn bowl assignments. But when the same crew makes headlines two out of three weeks, it's bad for the officials involved, the conference for college football.
Ultimately, Parry hopes to eliminate conference-specific crews, instead splitting the country into regional crews reporting to a regional supervisor. If such a system followed the current bowl assignment standards, it would reduce instances of the same officials working together on a crew, and the same crew working more than one game for a given team.
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