Foxx Thoughts

Unless you live under a rock, or just don’t follow college football at all, you’ve heard something about the referees in the South Eastern Conference. If you haven’t, just ask Bobby Petrino, Lane Kiffin, or Urban Meyer, they have all had something to say, and heard from the SEC about speaking out about SEC Officials (FYI incase you didn’t know, its in the rulebook you cant publicly criticize officials). Urban Meyer, the latest of the three was fined $30,000 for his public tongue-lashing of the officials. This past month, there has been a couple of calls that you could say were questionable (what am I saying, even the refs after reviewing the play that night were going WTF?), but in my most humble of opinions mistakes will be made. Such a big deal was made out of these based on the fact that they were basically game changing calls on high profile games (except for Kiffin’s case… he was just made the wrong call and wanted an excuse for it that didn’t blame him). These calls, and the fact that they were on two back to back weeks caused the suspension of one SEC crews. I myself completely disagreed with the calls and was actually heated about it (I feel Florida is over rated and should have lost that game) and at one point felt that the refs in question should be fired, if not forced to resign. After putting some more time and thought into it (and reading a little into the response from the referees who made the call) I realized that asking them to hang up their stripes was a little over the top. Digging much deeper into it, I found that I really blame the SEC and the NCAA for how the referee setup works. First off, there should be no set of crews, there should only be pools of referees. I’m ok if you want to split it into 2 pools (veterans and novices) but there should not be a set crew of people who always work with each other. This gives too much for a crew to be paid off or for a crew to have favorite teams. Secondly, I don’t think there should be conference referees. The rules of college football are the same in California as they are in Alabama, so there’s no reason a referee from Washington should have any problem officiating a football game being played in Georgia. Now that I’ve given the SEC crew a little rope, lets see what they do with it now. With so many teams in the SEC controlling a shot at the national title, there’s no room for error. Its hard enough playing the game alone, much less someone calling a penalty that really isn’t there. I wish good luck to the teams, but even more to the refs. This looks like a lose-lose season to them.