NFL Officials Reject a Best, Final Offer

Unfazed by the competent performance of their stand-ins in exhibition games, NFL officials rejected the league’s latest contract offer Thursday, meaning replacements will work at least the first week of the regular season, which begins Sunday.

“The officials are trying to shut the game down,” league spokesman Greg Aiello said. “We can’t let that happen.”

The league made its latest proposal Wednesday, offering a 60% raise for the first season, up from the previous offer of 40%, which would have led to a doubling of salaries by 2003.

The rest of the five-year deal remained the same, and the officials were given 24 hours to respond. They didn’t wait that long, rejecting it early Thursday.

The league has presented its best offer, Aiello said, and does not intend to budge.

No more talks are scheduled, and the NFL will decide early next week whether to use the replacements for a second round of games.

The league has guaranteed the replacements four weeks at $2,000 a game, counting last week’s exhibitions. Those games went smoother than many people expected, including the locked-out regulars.

“We were pleased” Aiello said. “The consensus among everybody-club people, players, coaches-was that we expected them to do well and they did. There are a lot of qualified officials out there.”

Agent Tom Condon, representing the officials, said in a radio interview Thursday that the league is asking for trouble by using replacements.

“I think what basically will happen, as you look at the NFL, we expect an absolutely superlative product, which is what we have gotten,” he said.

“We expect great performances from the players, that the coaches will make excellent decisions, and you expect excellence from the officials.

“The NFL’s published number is 99.85% accuracy rate [for officials]. Whether you see anything blatantly obvious on the field that makes us say, ‘We can’t stand for that, it is so bad,’ any drop-off in the officiating competency is certainly a step away from what the fans are used to.”

Before the lockout, Ed Hochuli one of the league’s top referees and the president of the union, sent an e-mail to 1,200 potential replacement officials warning, “Don’t go down as one of the scabs who stabbed the NFL guys in the back.”

The message continued: “What may sound like a fun diversion, a fun couple of games for you, is my career .... Working as a scab will actually hurt and likely kill any chances you would have of ever getting into the NFL.”

Aiello said “harassment” such as that e-mail is the main reason only one NFL Europe official agreed to work as a replacement. The 120-member pool mostly consists of officials from NCAA Division I and the Arena League. Four more college officials signed up this week. One of the replacements dropped out because of injury, Aiello said.

NFL players have expressed fears that their safety might be compromised by inexperienced officials who might be unsure in making calls.

The replacement crews called an average of 10 penalties in the exhibition finales, three fewer than the league average during the regular season.

“I am concerned, the players are concerned and I think even the coaches are concerned,” Oakland Raider defensive end Trace Armstrong, president of the NFL Players Assn., said before last Friday’s exhibition finale. “We are concerned from a player-safety standpoint, and we are concerned from an integrity-of-the-game standpoint.

“It’s a very difficult game to call. Look at some of the decisions [officials] have to make in split seconds with guys flying around, and I think you would see they do a pretty good job. We want NFL officials calling the games.”

New York Giant Coach Jim Fassel addressed his players last week about replacement officials.

“I said, ‘Men, don’t ever get it in your mind that the officials are going to win or lose a game for us. We’re going to do it. We control that,”’ he said.

“That’s out of our hands .... We’re going to play football.”