The Enigma of NFL Referees
It was a mild October afternoon in Minneapolis. The Minnesota Vikings, fresh off a disappointing home playoff loss to the eventual Super Bowl Champion Dallas Cowboys the year before, were looking to start their new season off right and extend their run of NFC dominance.
It was late in the game; the Vikings clinging to a 14-9 lead. Bob Lurtsema, a 5th-year defensive lineman was just beginning his first full season with the Vikings, having spent the first 4-plus years of his career with the New York Giants.
The Vikings’ defense was as fierce as they came. Coined “The Purple People Eaters,” they were the identity of the team, a team that regularly found itself in the post-season. And this afternoon was no different, having held their opponent out of the end zone for the first 58 minutes of the game.
Coming out of the two-minute warning, the Vikings’ pass rush was once again ferocious, forcing the opposing quarterback to wildly overthrow his target. Lurtsema, who had applied the pressure on that play, had spun around to watch the pass fall incomplete. Hand in the air in celebration, he turned back toward the defensive huddle when his cleat caught something on the field that almost tripped him up.
It was a penalty flag.
“I thought it was called against one of the offensive linemen holding me, like they had done all game,” Lurtsema said. (*)
But the call wasn’t holding on the offense. It was roughing the passer on the defense, specifically on Lurtsema, and it granted the opposition 15 yards and an automatic first down.
“It was a terrible call,” Lurtsema maintains. (*) Many who witnessed the play at the time and many who have written about it since share the same sentiment.
In the waning moments of the game, the Vikings’ opponent drove down and scored a go-ahead touchdown, stifled the Vikings’ offense on the ensuing drive, and won the game 16-14.
The year was 1972. The opponent was the Miami Dolphins. The rest, as they say, is history.
Fast forward fifty years, and here we are again. Fans of the Cincinnati Bengals as well as some talking heads across the NFL were apoplectic in the hours and days after the AFC Championship game between the Bengals and the Kansas City Chiefs, won by the Chiefs 23-20 in the game’s final seconds, claiming the Bengals were robbed by the officials and denied a second consecutive Super Bowl berth.
Some were just griping as fans are wont to do in the aftermath of a gut-wrenching loss. Others played the ‘woe is us’ card. Still others went full-speed off the deep end, claiming everything from anti-Bengal conspiracies to games and matchups being fixed.
The laughability of these claims is a discussion for another day. But on this day, I am here to plant my flag firmly on the hill of defending NFL referees.
Personally, I’ve reached maximum capacity with referee bashing across all sports. I’ve watched teenagers refereeing volleyball matches be viciously chastised by parents and fellow players. I’ve grown uncomfortable watching baseball games while a nearby ‘fan’ berates the home plate umpire with every decibel his overactive larynx can conjure. I’ve heard professional coaches themselves admit that they say things to referees that they’d never say to anyone in real life.
Why do we behave like this? What is it about referees that elicits this level of vitriol?
In defense of the men and women refereeing our sports, I’ll start by making an obvious point, but one that bears repeating:
We have no sports without them. Every sport, from the NFL to your kid’s bantam hockey team to bar league softball needs referees to exist and function.
There are seven referees (or more broadly, ‘officials’) in an NFL game. There are 22 players on the field at any given time. The NFL rule book PDF file prints out to a completely unreasonable 245 pages.
But the heart of the challenge that NFL officials face is an inconvenient truth about many of the rules they are called upon to enforce during each of the roughly 154 plays in an average NFL game:
The enforcement of many of these rules is subjective.
There are rules that are cut and dried. Is a player’s knee down? Did the ball break the plane? Did the center snap the ball in time? Rules like these have largely inarguable outcomes in the vast majority of cases where evidence of the appropriate call is easy to find and even easier to defend. But many of the most common infractions just aren’t that simple.
The infractions that could be argued as the ‘most’ subjective are holding and pass interference. These penalties were the first (offensive holding), third (defensive pass interference) and fourth (defensive holding) most frequently called penalties during the 2022-2023 season according to NFLPenalties.com.
These calls are the most frequent, the most subjective, and therefore the most controversial. We’ve all heard the argument that ‘holding could be called on every play.’ I watch a lot of football. That statement is undeniably true.
But is that the kind of game we want to watch? An endless deluge of penalty flags taking over the game disrupting any semblance of flow? No. We don’t want that. Referees know we don’t want that, which puts them in the even more unenviable position of having to rate the ‘egregiousness’ of a particular violation, ascertain to what degree said infraction affected the play, decide whether or not it is worthy of throwing the flag, and make this determination in about four seconds.
They need to make this determination while all 22 players on the field are engaged in various levels of beating the tar out of each other, most if not all of whom are trying to deceive them at every possible turn, often with obstructed views of gameplay that moves at breakneck speed with millions of eyes on their every move, millions if not billions of dollars at stake, hundreds of jobs on the line (including their own) while high-definition frame-by-frame replays are instantly available to everyone on the planet…except them.
Their every call, every move, right down to their positioning on the field and professionalism with players and coaches is reviewed by a panel of retired officials each and every week. They work OTA’s in the offseason to keep their skills fresh. They have two conferences a year highlighting rule changes and taking written tests to confirm their understanding of the rulebook. They work on year-to-year contracts; there is no guarantee any of them will be back for another season. Their performances are painstakingly scrutinized at the end of the year, and only then is it determined whether or not they’ll don the stripes again the following season. A full description of NFL officials’ training and yearly requirements is available at http://operations.nfl.com under the officials tab. It is well worth the read.
They do all of this while earning a fraction of the compensation of the players and coaches with which they work, and they do it with a 98.9% accuracy rate according to the NFL’s Officiating Department.
That is a stunning figure, given the obstacles officials have on just about every play, the pressure cooker in which they operate, and the endless abuse they take from fans, coaches and players. They march on. They work the next play. And they do it with remarkable precision.
Yes, we can all point to the outliers. An obvious missed pass interference here, a borderline holding there. A roughing the passer call that makes us shake our heads, or a missed block-in-the-back that results in a return touchdown. These are the exceptions, not the rules. And incorrect calls, painful as they are, even out over the course of time.
“But what about that no-call pass interference that kept the New Orleans Saints out of the Super Bowl in 2019?”
The Saints made their only Super Bowl appearance in 2010 based largely on a phantom pass interference penalty called against Minnesota Vikings linebacker Ben Leber in overtime that put the Saints in position to kick a game-winning field goal without the Vikings ever touching the ball.
I could go back and forth like this for hours. Missed calls eventually even out.
It is, however, high time the NFL makes their officials full-time employees. That officials in 2023 are still considered part-time is indefensible. Almost all officials work ‘day jobs,’ spanning the spectrum from attorney to dairy farmer. A league that generates almost $20 billion in annual revenue with franchises worth an average of over $4 billion each should be able to add 121 officials to its full-time payroll, filling that extra time with performance enhancement activities, thorough self-evaluations, peer reviews and rigorous film study.
It's time the NFL makes that change. We love dairy farmers; we just don’t need them refereeing our highest-level sports.
I look forward to the day the NFL rights this wrong. Until then, I’m going to continue to admire these officials for the incredible job they do under immense public and professional pressure, and I’m going to boisterously thank them for doing what they do, because it allows the rest of us to enjoy a sport that has become an indispensable part of our recreational lives.
I encourage you to join me.
(*) – quotes cited from “1972 Miami Dolphins: The inside story of the only perfect season in NFL history” – by Cameron Wolfe, NFL.com reporter