The Football Referee Final Chapter-A Message To The SEC

So I know I said I wouldn’t write about this any more, but apparently the story just won’t seem to go away.  I’ve written about the SEC Football ref crew and their leader in two posts and now the story has taken a couple of new twists and turns.

The first twist came when the SEC announced that this particular crew was going to have to sit out their next assignment.  You can read more about it here.   Then ESPN interviewed the white head head of the crew who admitted that he blew the call in the Arkansas Florida game.   More details if you want to read about it in this article.

Now as I have written before, I know Marc Curles very well and have spoken to him several times about these calls.  And the bottom line is that he is a class act.  At this point, I’m not so sure that I feel the same way about the SEC at this point.

Now before you start jumping up and down, hear me out.  I do believe that there has got to be accountability and I do believe that it makes sense to sit crews down as a part of that accountability.  But I want to see consistency in that, not just a knee jerk reaction to screaming and yelling because of the implications of one game (Ark-Fla).

I have seen a lot of bad calls caught on TV and several this year alone.  But I didn’t see those crews called out.  I didn’t see head coaches crying and whining like Arkansas coach Bobby Petrino (that’s a whole story in itself) did afterwards.  So my question is WHY THIS TIME?

Crews are graded for each and every game each and every week.  Why did this crew and this official get singled out?  Some might argue that it was the combination of the UGA LSU game with this recent incident.  But after seeing the film on the AJ Green penalty and understanding the vagueness of the rule on Excessive Celebration, my thought is that the SEC threw this crew and ref under the bus.

Show me some consistency and I’ll change my opinion.  But the bottom line, as I told Marc, is that every ref misses a call now and then.  But if we are going to have accountability for these blown calls, let’s see it across the board.

And now I am really through talking about it. I really mean it!