A Few Ex-NFL Referees Still Earning Their Stripes

Less than 12 hours after the last yellow flag has fluttered to the ground tonight, eight former professional football officials begin gathering in the dim light of the NFL’s video wonderland for their weekly exercise in second-guessing the 112 men now wearing the striped shirts on NFL fields.

Every man in the room on the 15th floor of the NFL’s Park Avenue headquarters has blown a whistle (and an occasional call) in the largest stadiums in the land. For the next three days, they will pore over tape of the weekend’s games in mind-numbing detail, fast-forwarding and rewinding over and over to detect even the slightest trace of an error by their colleagues on the field.

It is a labor of love for them, a detached, unemotional, objective exercise designed with the noblest of intentions in mind: to make certain the mistakes of the past are corrected in the immediate future, the better to reach the virtually unreachable goal--the perfectly officiated football game.

Jerry Seeman has been the NFL’s senior director of officiating for eight years. A native Minnesotan with an upper Midwest accent that surely could have earned him a speaking part in the movie “Fargo,” he is the producer and director of this complex production, a man who spent 15 years as an NFL referee making instant decisions. Now, in the video room, there is right and wrong, with a gray area, too, and the reality that game officials do make mistakes, an average of about 3 1/2 per game, he said. Sometimes there are a few more, occasionally a few less, but almost never is there perfection.

“We are not perfect,” Seeman said one recent morning, inviting a reporter into his inner sanctum for a daylong snapshot of the workings of his department. “The whole purpose is to reduce errors. We’re proud of our officials, how they handle themselves on the field having to make these quick judgments under very difficult circumstances. Our role is to teach and to train, just like the coaches do with their players.”

Seeman’s staff has four full-time members, all listed as supervisors of officials--Mike Pereira, Larry Upson, Al Hynes and Ron DeSouza. There also are three part-timers, including Art McNally, now “retired” after 23 years as the league’s director of officiating, as well as former NFL officials Jack Reader and Dick McKenzie. They all ascribe to Seeman’s so-called 10 commandments of NFL officiating, with No. 1 being, “Make Super Bowl calls only, no Woolworth calls.”

“That means it’s got to be big,” Seeman said. “If it’s a call that could determine a Super Bowl, call it. I don’t want Woolworth calls, nickel and dime kind of stuff.”

Over the first three days of every week during the season, Seeman and his men grade each crew’s seven officials for their calls, or their noncalls. At the end of the season, the 10 highest graded crews are rewarded with playoff assignments and the top man at every position, with at least five years experience, advances as a member of the all-star crew to the Super Bowl in Miami on Jan. 31. Officials are expected to make the correct decision about 90 percent of the time, if not better, in every game.

The men in New York begin their work by studying the game report submitted by the referee, singling out for review his crew’s toughest plays and asking for second opinions. They go to the videotape to answer written queries faxed in by head coaches on plays they believe were called incorrectly, or plays they would like to have interpreted to better coach their players. They will pluck out particularly vexing plays, or prime examples of rules violations, for inclusion on a training tape Seeman prepares each week for review by every crew the day before the next game.

Occasionally, they will get a visit from Seymour Siwoff of the Elias statistical service, the better to rule on what Siwoff calls “squawks.” On Mondays, Siwoff often hears from position coaches about sacks not credited to defensive linemen, fumbles forced by someone other than the man who got credit in the play-by-play, whether a man should be given a 31-yard run when game tape showed it clearly was 32. On Wednesdays, Siwoff rewards Seeman’s crew, which he calls the “squawk hounds,” with doughnuts.

Even before they arrive to begin the process Monday morning, their resources are mostly in place. Video coordinators from every team have sent coaching tapes on overnight flights to New York. The network telecasts of every game also have been collected, along with game action provided by NFL Films crews working at every contest.

Each man in the room will be asked to review every play in at least two games, and occasionally three. They have the official play-by-play in front of them as a guidepost, and every snap of the ball will be analyzed from a variety of angles--end zone, sideline, field level. Each man has his own monitor, with the ability to do his own super-slow-motion study to determine if, for example, two feet actually stayed in bounds, whether a knee touched the ground before a ball was fumbled, whether a cornerback had a death grip on a wide receiver’s jersey as they jockeyed for position on a deep pass.

By no means, however, is one man’s opinion the only opinion on an official’s grade. Just as game officials on the field occasionally huddle for help, the other men in the video room also will be asked for their opinions on what they all refer to as “tight” plays (extremely close calls).

The video room is dominated at the front end by a huge screen that would be the envy of any sports bar in America. It’s connected to each of the individual monitors around the room, the better for the group to look at a particularly difficult play and offer opinions and possible grades, which are later recorded in computers at the other end of the room. Occasionally, there is disagreement, and there are times when, despite all of the tape at the group’s disposal, no camera can prove the call right or wrong.

“That’s definitely OPI (offensive pass interference),” one man will call out.

“Roll it back again,” another voice rings out. “Let’s see it from end zone. . . . No wait, maybe it is DPI (defensive pass interference). . . . Oooh boy, that’s tight, that’s real tight.”

All the while, Seeman offers running commentary.

“The head linesman could have been a little firmer. . . . There’s a play at the sideline, we want ‘em to look first at the feet and then go to the ball. . . . See that guy looking at the ball . . . good call . . . oh geez, he never had the ball. . . . Who ruled on that, gosh almighty that’s classic training stuff . . . very good . . . nice job . . . Mention to those guys that if you’re going to have a crew conference, never have it near the bench area.”

It’s clearly a congenial group--and not above having an occasional laugh or two.

“Hey look, the back judge can’t get his flag out,” one man points out as a back judge futilely reaches to his back pocket, grabbing nothing but air. “He’s got to stop scratching back there and get to that flag.”

Reader keeps them loose with a seemingly endless supply of jokes and quips. They often eat lunch together, leaving their monitors at the same time, sharing a long table in the league’s cafeteria before returning to their monitors and the big screen.

“We’ve come a long way since the days we put a sheet up on the wall and ran the 16-millimeter projector,” said McNally, who works Monday through Wednesday, then heads to a game site Saturday morning for his weekend duties. “For me, it’s perfect. I love this work, I’m involved in educating officials. I get all the benefits and none of the headaches. That’s Jerry’s department now.”

Seeman will break ties on grades for a particular play, but he has an appeals process in place. Each man in the video room also will attend a game the following Sunday as an observer. One of the tapes they have been reviewing will feature the officiating crew they will see on Sunday or Monday night.

Seeman’s men arrive at a game site Saturday, just like all the officials assigned to that contest the next day, and will use tapes to review the previous week’s game with the crew during a four-hour Saturday meeting. If an official feels he was given an incorrect grade, the play will be reviewed again the following week by the group back in New York. Officials also take a written rules test at their Saturday meetings, and training tapes on a certain subject--pass interference, holding, dead-ball fouls--will be shown as well as 40-45 plays from around the league of the previous week’s games.

In between overseeing the operation and watching the tougher calls, Seeman spends a good bit of time on the telephone. If glaring mistakes have been made, he will call the man involved as well as the crew’s referee and let them know what the review has indicated. It’s done with no rancor, and usually ends with an upbeat “Good job” or “Well-officiated game.”