The Football Referee Part II

OK, so bear with me.  This will be the last time I write about this (at least this particular situation anyway).  But you read my post about the excessive celebration penalty at the recent UGA-LSU game.  Well this past weekend, during the Florida-Arkansas football game, this same ref crew had some more controversy.  Read on….There were a number of calls that the Arkansas fans really didn’t like, but I see that every football game.  But then at a key point, the white hat threw the flag on an Arkansas defensive lineman for unnecessary roughness and the replay led to some outraged Razorback faithful.

So I’m not going into all the details of the penalty.  The guy missed the call.  And I talked to him and he admitted that he missed it.  But what transpired afterwards is just not justified.

Like after the Bulldog game, he has received ugly email after ugly email.  But it got worse this time.  The Arkansas football fans hunted down his home phone number and are calling his house?  Now the question in my first post was, When is enough enough?

And I almost don’t know what to say after this last incident.  Well as I said, almost.  But here is the bottom line in my humble opinion.  If football fans really want to see bad calls in football games, keep harassing the crews in this manner.  And sure enough it will get worse.

Because these guys will just  stop doing it.  And most of them do it because they love the game.  But if we run off this generation of officials, we will probably see a new generation that are there ONLY to pick up a few extra bucks.  I’ve seen it before at the high school level and it can happen here.

So I don’t agree with it, as I said last time.  And I hope that the rest of us avid football fans will help talk some sense into the more emotional ones and help bring some sanity to this madness.

Just my thoughts.  What about yours?