Never one to shy away from his opinions, Arizona Cardinals’ head coach Bruce Arians has some thoughts on full time officials in the NFL.
Bruce Arians has taken some flack recently for comments he made about parents being “fools” for not letting their children play football because of concerns about CTE and other life-altering injuries that can come from laying football (or any other sport, or just taking a walk in the park, if we’re being technical). This time Arians voices his opinion on on referees, calling for them to be full time employees.
The issue at hand is one that Arians hits the nail on the head via ProFootballTalk:
"We scout the official that we have each Sunday as hard as we do the opposing team, because they’re all different and all call things differently, and they have different interpretations."
While many could argue that this is an element to the game, football has become such a complex monster that having a team scout the officials that will be calling it, not looking for ways to break the rules, per se, but just what is likely to be called in the game, right wrong or indifferent.
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Everyone is going to have a subjective opinion on what a foul is, what type of foul you may have just performed, or how long you should be allowed to “let them play” before something drastically impacts the game.
Arians justification, and one that has been voiced more than a few times over, is that referees are not full time employees, aren’t compensated as such, and, with other jobs paying all the bills, while they are good, not all their time and energy are spent on football games.
The Arizona Cardinals head coach isn’t the first coach, player or even official to bring up this fact, and he won’t be the last. The common argument is that it would be expensive to extend benefits to another union of employees, but in a league that is making billions of dollars in revenue, and being paid $10-$15 to stream games on the internet, it just seems asinine that 17 employees can’t be given full time status in one of the richest businesses this country has ever known.
With full time officials it may fundamentally change the way that officiating is done in the NFL, as a way to bring consistency to each game, with an unfair advantage not being gained from one officiating team who may call more of one foul as opposed to another. While subjective decisions will need to be made in most cases, more focus and training may take some of the guess work out of it.
No matter what, fans won’t like any call the refs make, so no one should be focused on making them happy, trust me, I know.