The Olympics are over, which means it’s almost time for football. Actually, football has been with us for the past week, in case you were too busy watching team handball. College squads have entered training camp, and every N.F.L. team has already played a preseason game. Andrew Luck threw a touchdown on his first N.F.L. play, Robert Griffin III threw one on his fourteenth, and Tim Tebow threw an interception on his twenty-third as a New York Jet. All is as it should be.
Or maybe not. One year removed from labor negotiations that threatened the 2011 football season, the N.F.L. is stuck in a contract dispute again, this time with all of its hundred and twenty referees. The issues are familiar ones: pay and pensions. Last season, N.F.L. officials made a hundred and forty-nine thousand dollars. The league has offered to raise that figure, in increments, to a hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars. The officials want more. The league wants to move from its current retirement plan to a 401(k). The officials don’t.
The last referee work stoppage happened eleven years ago, when the refs went on strike for one week. Back then, they were replaced by referees from major college football. This time, the college guys have abstained in solidarity. That means that the referees currently working preseason games—and potentially those in the regular season as well—are being called up from AA ball and below: high-school football, low-level college football, arena football, the Lingerie Football League. Nonetheless, the N.F.L. insists that they will be up to the task. Last month, the league sent a memo to coaches and executives of all thirty-two teams lauding the “experienced and high-quality officials.” They had passed medical exams, background checks, and several training sessions. “They are now ready for ‘grass time,’” the league said. Teams were then given “talking points for use by owners and a separate set of talking points for use by head coaches.” It seemed pointless, since most of the comments didn’t sound much different from every coach’s standard script: “Our focus is on preparing our team for the coming season. We don’t worry about things we can’t control.”
The referee’s union does not think much of the subs, and has been quick to point out that its members have an average of ten years experience in the N.F.L. The replacements, of course, have none. Accusations flew that the league was trumping up the experience of the unofficial officials. One had apparently been released midway through a season with the Lingerie Football League—an all-female league that is pretty much what it sounds like—and had not, as the N.F.L. claimed, worked college games. The loudest voice on the issue has been Mike Pereira, the league’s former head of officiating, who has said that the replacement refs undermine the integrity of the game. He said that even one of the triumphs of the replacement moment—one of the subs, Shannon Eastin, was the first woman to work an N.F.L. game—shouldn’t have happened: Eastin once competed in the World Series of Poker, which, Pereira said, should have disqualified her as a violation of the league’s anti-gambling policy when it comes to hiring referees.
So far, the Internet has been quick to point out any and all mistakes: the replacements have called touchbacks that were clearly not touchbacks, missed innumerable holding penalties, and referred to Atlanta as “Arizona.” A colleague who admitted to purchasing the N.F.L.’s online preseason package said it looked like the referee in his team’s first preseason game—the one who couldn’t remember which team he was supposed to be refereeing—“was about to have a panic attack” as he fumbled his way through explaining a challenge. The Onion created its own list of gaffes the replacements had made: “Crossing a picket line, screwing over colleagues, destroying any chance of ever getting into pro referee union.” During the first game of the season, in Canton, Ohio, players were openly mocking the refs from the sidelines.
It seems likely that the lockout will be resolved before meaningful games begin. The union has made the argument that the replacement referees are not familiar enough with the N.F.L.’s player-safety guidelines, an issue that the league will be especially sensitive to in its first post-Bountygate season. But maybe the replacements will still be on the field for the regular season. Then the question becomes how much worse they are than the people they’re replacing—men who, at any other time, would be referred to as bums by half of the fans sitting in any given sports bar. Are these guys really that much worse, or do sports fans in general just love complaining about the refs? We don’t have much to go off, but there’s this: in the sixteen preseason games thus far, replacement refs have called one fewer penalty per game (eleven) than the pros did last year. Are they missing infractions? Are they scared to make calls that might be questionable? Or is this statistical sample so small as to be meaningless? We’ll swallow the whistle for now.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
