NFL Referees Earn Stripes : Pro football: To the officials, anonymity is bliss. When the fans don’t know they are on the field, “that’s the name of the game.”

To an NFL referee, anonymity is bliss.

“We would like to come into a town and leave without ever being noticed,” says Larry Nemmers, a 10-year veteran of NFL officiating. “When people don’t know we’re out there, that’s the name of the game.”

Such was the case when Nemmers and his crew got together in Cleveland earlier this season for a typical weekend of wall-to-wall football.

On Saturday afternoon, they caught Ohio State-Purdue on TV. Then they scared up an unused conference room at the Airport Marriott so they could pore over three hours of specially edited NFL highlights.

And Sunday, they had the best standing-room view you could imagine for the sold-out Bengals-Browns game.

Clearly, these guys take their football seriously.

“We figure we work 1,500 to 1,700 hours a year,” said Nemmers, 51, a retired high school principal. “We consider that pretty much a full-time job.”

The NFL still likes to think of its officials as part-timers, for the obvious reason: Part-time work, part-time pay.

But the officials--most of whom work other jobs during the week--formed an association and won a new contract in September that nearly doubled their salaries. Pay now ranges from $1,325 per game for a first-year official to $4,009 per game for someone with 20 years’ experience.

Nemmers, with 10 years’ experience, gets $2,239 per game. Although as referee he’s the lead official on the crew, he makes no more than any other official with the same amount of experience.

The NFL has 15 crews, each with seven officials.

*

“We all watch the officiating in other games,” Nemmers said. “I’m a cheerleader for the other officials. We all are. It doesn’t make any difference what official makes a poor call; it reflects on all of us.”

And yes, NFL officials are every bit as defensive about their work as you might imagine. Nothing bugs them more than TV announcers who don’t know the rules as well as they should, or act as if they do.

An example: In a Monday night game between Kansas City and Denver a few weeks ago, John Elway threw an apparent touchdown pass that was nullified because the receiver came back for the ball after being pushed out of the end zone. Nemmers, watching on TV, heard one of the announcers complain that the defensive back should have been whistled for illegal contact; in fact, the push was legal because Elway had scrambled out of the pocket.

“And you know, those announcers never come back and correct themselves,” Nemmers said.

A nasty comment by an announcer pales in comparison with getting “dinged” by the league office. That’s ref-speak for a “downgrade,” every official’s nightmare. Too many can cost you your job; top guns at each position, by contrast, work the Super Bowl.

Each week, Jerry Seeman, the NFL’s director of officiating, and his staff go over tapes of every game, evaluating every flag that was thrown and every flag that should have been thrown. Each official gets a grade, and some of the best and worst calls of the week are compiled into an instructional tape that crew members watch together on Saturday.

On this particular week, members of another crew got dinged for failing to eject Atlanta’s Andre Rison and San Francisco’s Deion Sanders for fighting.

“When players swing at each other like that, you gotta kick ‘em out,” Nemmers said.

Even Deion?

“They’re just numbers to us,” said Don Orr, the field judge on Nemmers’ crew.

*

Nemmers’ weekend begins at 3:45 a.m. Saturday, when the alarm goes off at his home in Springfield, Mo., so he can catch a 5:30 a.m. flight to Cleveland via Dallas. All members of the crew are supposed to be at the game hotel by 2 p.m.

Shortly after noon, there’s an informal meeting in Nemmers’ hotel room, followed by three hours of film work, a trip to church, dinner, and a couple hours going over the weekly open-book test from the league office.

Sunday, the crew members arrive at the stadium several hours before kickoff so they can check field conditions, meet with representatives of both teams, ensure players’ equipment and uniforms meet regulations, and go over other last-minute details.

The work hardly ends at the final gun. There’s paperwork--all penalties and timeouts are logged as the game progresses--and the referee later can request tapes of disputed or interesting plays from NFL Films for review.

*

In season, Nemmers tends to NFL business every day of the week.

--Monday: After faxing his game report to the NFL office, he holds a preliminary discussion of the game with a supervisor. He also spends about 1 1/2 hours daily working out on his stationary bike, Soloflex and run-in-place trampoline.

--Tuesday: Throughout the week, Nemmers sets aside 45-minute blocks for rules study.

--Wednesday: A specially prepared videotape of the last game for review arrives via overnight mail.

--Thursday: The league tells Nemmers which game his crew will be working in four weeks (assignments are always made four weeks ahead), and one of the supervisors calls to critique last Sunday’s game.

--Friday: Nemmers checks the weather for this week’s game site and packs accordingly. He also picks up a newspaper with the stats of the teams he’ll be officiating Sunday so he’ll know their tendencies. “A third-and-3 with Detroit isn’t the same as a third-and-3 with Denver,” Nemmers says. The crew tries to have the action flanked at all times by at least two officials, preferably more. Anticipation helps.

*

It’s easier to handle the increasing NFL demands now that Nemmers has taken early retirement from his job as principal at Elgin High School in Illinois. He plans on teaching a few courses at Southwest Missouri State soon, however, and all the other members of his crew still hold other jobs.

“I never let the National Football League interfere with being a high school principal,” said Nemmers, who retired from his regular job last June. “The students and teachers always wanted to know where you were going the next week. They were very supportive.

“One time I had a Bears game in New Orleans, and I called Jim Harbaugh for intentional grounding. It was a fairly easy call. He threw it 20 yards out of bounds and there was no receiver in the area. The Bears had to punt.

“The next day I was walking into school, and I had one of the school’s football players come up, put his arm around me and say, ‘Mr. Nemmers, you cost me five bucks yesterday.’ But it was always good-natured.”