Officially, It Is a Judgment Call

Demands for full-time NFL officiating are again being heard, but if the league has a problem here, full-timers, clearly, are not the solution. Without exception, the game-day calls that hurt the worst are judgment calls. And judgment is judgment. How would a 9-to-5 workday improve any football man’s judgment?

Presumably, full-time officials would be old football players or old coaches. Certainly, they wouldn’t be old violinists or sportswriters.

So let’s take a typical close call on the goal line. Would you rather be judged by an old coach or by the professionals who do it now? They’re part-timers, true, but they have been officiating for many years. And on their other jobs, they are businessmen, stockbrokers, computer analysts, attorneys, insurance executives, real estate brokers, school principals, school superintendents, longshoremen, firefighters, bank presidents, sales managers, marketing consultants, university professors, probation officers, financial planners, fund raisers, therapists, investigators, economists, and dentists, who, in their daily lives, plainly need and must use good judgment. Of the NFL’s 114 officials, three are dentists.

During the NFL season, these 114 people work full-time shifts on football up to three days a week. How would their judgment improve if, like the rest of us, they worked five?

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TOO MANY PENALTIES are marring games again this season, everyone agrees. But the officials obviously aren’t to blame for that. Their job is to call ‘em. Thirty other guys are at fault for the cascades of penalty flags--the NFL’s 30 head coaches.

On every pro club, leadership has failed to enforce the kind of discipline that would minimize false starts, illegal blocks and other silly infractions that have slowed down almost every game.

For this particular problem, there is really only one fix. An NFL club owner should be heavily fined whenever his team runs up seven, eight or 10 penalties--the exact number is, for now, negotiable--in any 60 minutes of football.

The owners could then, at their option, pass on the fines to their players or coaches.

What’s happened in recent years is that the game has been getting too big for most coaches. On top of their usual workload, they have had to learn, or try to learn, the difficult new offense brought in to the NFL by former San Francisco Coach Bill Walsh and his disciples in Green Bay, Denver, Minnesota and elsewhere. Passing teams like theirs are the only big winners now.

Just being in charge, therefore, takes more time than any NFL coach really has.

On some teams, assistant coaches help some. Assistant coaches in charge of eliminating silly penalties would help more. But in the fight against the penalty plague, nothing will help enough but a system of fines.

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ON GAME DAY, throwing first-down passes is the best way for a new quarterback to break into pro football. The worst way is to pass on third and long, when defensive players rev up to burst in and initiate the young passer.

Although that is Lesson 1 in the care and feeding of young quarterbacks, many NFL coaches apparently missed school that day and didn’t get it.

Thus, with a new quarterback named Tony Graziani in the game last week, Atlanta ran the ball on the early downs of nearly every series, then asked Graziani to convert with passes on third and seven or eight or 10. As St. Louis pass rushers attacked him on third down from every point on the compass, Atlanta was held to three points in the first half, after which the young quarterback was benched.

Against any team with a running back as dangerous as Atlanta’s Jamal Anderson--and there are two dozen such backs in the league--most defensive coaches are reluctant to blitz the passer on first down. They’re afraid of the run. That is the rationale for first-down passing.