Do part-time NFL refs still make sense?

Another NFL playoff weekend has come and gone, and, as has become all too common in recent years, the officials are at least part of the weekend's storyline. It seems like this happens at least once every playoff season, if not more often - a game where there a couple almost inexplicable calls in favor of one team. The game of choice this week was the Colts/Chargers game. Fortunately for the NFL and the referees, the team that got the perceived slight from the refs ended up winning the game, or it would be a dominant story.

I'm not going to go in blow by blow and analyze the calls in question. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, for one thing. Mistakes happen, and as long as humans are responsible for officiating sports, there will be officiating errors. It's a part of the game, albeit an unfortunate part. And even if actual mistakes aren't made, there will always be officiating controversies, as bias towards one team or another colors the views of fans on various instances. And the simple fact of that matter is that there are very few instances where you could convince me that officiating errors were enough change the outcome of a game. And yet, I've come to believe much more in the last few years that, even at the highest levels of sports, games can turn on good or poor officiating. An NFL football game can often turn (not be decided, necessarily) on a single play, and so a correct or incorrect call on a play can also turn a game.

The point I'm getting to here with the NFL is one I've been harping on repeatedly, ever since the much disputed officiating performance in the Super Bowl two years ago between the Steelers and the Seahawks. Again, I'm not going to dissect the officiating in that game, but the furor that arose surrounding that game led me to the following question: Why would the NFL, a 6 billion dollar industry, leave the credibility of its product in the hands of part-time employees, namely the officials. That's correct, NFL officials are part-timers, unlike the officials in all other major sports. Now, it's a fair point that the NFL only has a 16 game season, compared to the other 3 sports which all have at least 82 games. A few decades ago, it certainly made sense to only employee part-time officials.

However, the times have changed. The NFL is the most popular professional sports league in the US, and as such has millions of eyes glued to it every single Sunday, and hoards of media attention. The level of scrutiny of officials has never been higher. While the NFL can't really have refs work multiple games in a week, or use more time from officials in that sort of fashion, I have to believe that there would be significant value in having the referees focusing solely on officiating through out the week. There would be more time for tape review, for going over clarifications and interpretations. Like I said earlier, I understand that there will always be mistakes, and true consistency on a number of rules will be near impossible to ever achieve. That being said, it only stands to reason that the more times you go over what holding is, the more examples you see of what it is and what it isn't, the easier it would be for you to make the calls. I can't imagine that the extra money the NFL would have to invest to go to full-time officials wouldn't be well worth it in the long run.

My team, the Eagles, has not been a part of any of the major playoff officiating controversies over the last few years, so I've been able to come at them from a relatively unbiased perspective, and I have to concede that there have been serious issues, often seeming to favor one team. Some would have you believe that the NFL is trying to direct outcomes in these games, but I've never bought into that. The potential short term reward of getting a more "favorable" matchup the following week just doesn't seem to me to be worth risking the long term damage that any discovery of such a scheme would do to the league. And yet I have to concede, year in and year out, we play the same story over and over again, and it just doesn't seem like the NFL really is that interested in stepping up and doing everything they can to make sure officiating is as good as it can be. The obvious fact that it will never be perfect should not be justification for being satisfied with less than what can be attained.