SIAP Josh Pate on CFB officiating
- Thread starter psuro
- Start date
He’s right. The biggest issue is there is no accountability so this is allowed to continue.
Any coach who questions officials, even when he’s 100% correct, will get fined.
Then that coach will get a letter, maybe, that’s says you’re right- it was a bad call. Don’t be late sending in the fine money……. and you’ll see the same incompetent officials next week.
There’s needs to be a weekly grading of each official and yearly promotion/ firing based on performance.
Any coach who questions officials, even when he’s 100% correct, will get fined.
Then that coach will get a letter, maybe, that’s says you’re right- it was a bad call. Don’t be late sending in the fine money……. and you’ll see the same incompetent officials next week.
There’s needs to be a weekly grading of each official and yearly promotion/ firing based on performance.
A few of those calls are clearly good calls (ie, the blindside block on the pick 6 or the targeting call), but the host obviously doesn’t know/understand those rules.
They may say they do…..but do they?
. If so, the accountability portion appears to be missing. They don’t seem to improve week after week, year after year. The Big Ten officiating is a poster child for controversial officials never being booted. From what I hear from SEC fans, they think their officiating is horrible as well.Every fanbase in the country has fans that think the refs are out to get their team, or that their conference’s football (and basketball) referees are terrible. The fact is, Big Ten/SEC refs are the best you’ll see outside of the NFL.They may say they do…..but do they?
And the reviews are a joke. Nothing ever comes from them, except at the NFL level. Conferences don't want to spend the money necessary to impove the discipline
Not a question of bias, but competence. And while the officials at the Big Ten and SEC level are the best outside of the NFL, they still suck balls.
That’s like bragging about being the tallest midget (sorry- ‘little person’
). I’m not talking about fans bitching over a controversial call here and there. Watch Pate’s video. It speaks for itself.
It would “speak for itself” more if he hadn’t added some plays that were pretty textbook calls. He could say “I don’t understand the targeting rule” or ask “does it matter if the player is a QB” when criticizing the blindside block, but it’s pretty bad to include correct calls in that video.That’s like bragging about being the tallest midget (sorry- ‘little person’
I’m not talking about fans bitching over a controversial call here and there. Watch Pate’s video. It speaks for itself.
Several were the body weight call which I hate, but if the rule is being put in and they’re being asked to call it, I’d think some of the criticism of the guys on the field is misguided.
I always thought one possible solution was to recruit former players, especially at the skill positions. For one, they could keep up with the play better. For another, they know what the other guy was trying to get away with when they were players--and what they got away with themselves as a player.
Actually given the amount of money in CFB, how about full time officials?
I'd think those costs would be astronomical, and question how much of an improvement you'd actually see.
I can understand the refs getting it wrong, sometimes, but the poor spots that seemingly help some teams and hurt others should not be happening and there is no excuse for replay getting it wrong, none.
You're onto something. A lot, maybe the majority, of officials are simply too immobile to keep up with the pace of the game. Additionally, there are too few.
As they say in West Virginia and Kaintuck, it's all relative. College football officials make peanuts.
I saw something that said they make (at P4 level), upwards of $3500 per game. Not sure if it's true.
Exactly...this is only a small part of their income, and most have "real" jobs. I don't think many of these guys are leaving their law practices, school superintendent positions, etc to start making 60k each year officiating full time. These aren't guys that you're trying to pull away from their entry level jobs...so unless we're starting over with a bunch of inexperienced 20somethings, it's not really practical unless you're paying 100k times 7 times ~60 (and even then, you'd likely lose many of the better officials who aren't taking a pay cut).
Could you imagine if O’Neill or Witvoet had this kind of scorecard when PSU played the Big2!
Then you get what you pay for, which is a substandard product.
Reality is that there are more than enough officials working at lower levels who can do a better job than the Elmer Fudds on display every Saturday. But that would mean that the clowns the conferences hire to run their officiating would actually have to work to identify them. Even worse, it would upset the old boy apple cart. So we'll just have to settle for a doofis like LeMonnier falling all over himself to cover for the incompetence of his buddies.
Then explain how people like Witvoet, Honig, O'Neill kept their jobs for an eternity while also blowing big calls repeatedly.
It is also long past time for conference affiliated officials to be abolished in favor of a national pool of officials governed by the NCAA.
You're naming guys that weren't just respected within the Big Ten, but graded out high enough to get extremely high profile assignments like major bowls and National Title games.
Take O'Neill...everyone here thinks he sucked, but once he hung up his whistle, he was quickly hired by the NFL. And while he was reffing, the closest thing you have to a "national pool" of officials graded him highly enough that he did a National Title game.
If you're a ref and the fans of multiple teams recognize you and know you by name, odds are that you probably suck at your job. Refs should be relatively unmemorable if they are doing their job properly. Yes, there is a subset of fans that will cry about officiating even when objectively the calls are correct. Of course refs are human and will make the occasional error, but if they are good those errors will be relatively random and distributed across all teams. But when there are repetitive errors for years by the same people, it's clear there are issues. Unless the job performance ratings for these clowns is made public you're never going to convince me they objectively graded out better than their peers. The Big 10 doesn't make refs accountable at all, and for some reason during the era of the names I mentioned they allowed the perception of bias to exist by assigning these guys to games they shouldn't have ever been allowed to officiate... Honig being born and raised in Michigan, was a UM alumnus, was a former UM employee, lived in Ann Arbor and owned a store that sold UM memorabilia, should have excluded him from ever reffing any UM or tOSU games for example. Fortunately in general the officiating seems better today than in did in that era.
Last edited:
Agree with the bold completely (just as family members shouldn't have been reffing PSU games)...seems that it was much more common back in the day as everything was much more localized, but they've gotten away from that thankfully (and Honig said he asked them to not assign him to any Michigan games after he did a few).
I'd say that referees become recognizable because they do many high profile games and become well known (or have physical features that are easy to pick out), not because they suck. When it came to hockey, I knew Bill McCreary...boxing, I knew Mills Lane and Richard Steele...I know the Premier League refs that do the biggest games (Anthony Taylor, Howard Webb, Clattenberg, etc). Football fans know guys that do a lot of Prime Time games, Playoff/National Title games, etc (all of which those guys fall into). College basketball fans know the guys that do the high profile games...Sam Lickliter screwed us more than any ref on the basketball court, but most couldn't pick him out of a lineup.
What about it isn't an accident? Through two games, I'd likely chalk it up to variance (at some level, if you're doing a game and teams keep committing penalties, are you just supposed to not call them?).
Bowl assignments mean little more than squadoosh. Crews are picked from a conference without a team in the game. There is no independent evaluation. Crew ratings come from the conference.
O'Neill is the equivalent of a position coach, literally. His hiring was similar to someone being hired by a group of fraternity brothers.
Some crews throw a million flags a game and it's almost unwatchable every freaking week. Same crews every weekend, that's all.
Last season, Blakeman's crew was 12th (of 17 crews) in penalties/game. In 2023, the spread from the highest penalizing crew to the least penalizing crew was about 3 penalties/game.
But you know there's certain crews that completely ruin the flow of the game with ticky tack fouls. You look at it from a gambling standpoint which I couldn't give 2 shìts about. I watch as a fan of football. And that's not a shot at you. I understand you're view.
I (and people I work with) have spent a lot of time through the years looking at penalties (and fouls in NCAA basketball), and other trends when it comes to officials. It pretty much all turns out to be noise. Some crew has to have the highest penalty rate thru 2 weeks (or 5 weeks, or a full season)…and it’s never predictive of what’s coming next.
One sport where is a bit more predictive is baseball with plate umpires…but even that is less than you’d think.
Yeah. Braves fan with Eric Gregg memories that's not a fan of anal-ytics here.
This was followed up by a HBP call in the bottom of the 10th, was challenged, clearly didn't hit the batter yet was upheld on replay. I have no idea what the replay booth was possibly looking at.
That's my biggest gripe with officiating - the replay booth. I can understand an official missing a bang-bang call in any sport (live). It's just mind boggling when some of the replay calls are missed when everybody in the viewing audience sees the correct call during all the replays and the replay official goes the other way.
Being involved as a coach for 25 years I've got some interesting takes on the officiating. I know the 'data' says some of these guys are not bad but I also know that evaluations dont mean much either. The guys at the highest level are not awful as a whole but yes some guys are and their bosses know it. The lower the level the worse it is due to ref shortages and distance traveling and pay. I've had guys who umpire Eastern League, Carolina league Sally league baseball say the best guys dont always get regular work because it's like other things in life, its who you know.
When coaching HS hoops in PA 25 years ago I had an official who hated me because I always called him out about how he didnt know the rules and he was a 20 year vet. We had the seatbelt rule then and if a coach stood up, they had to take a TO or were assessed a T. I was calling for a TO and finally stood up so that he had to stop the game. I said I wanted a TO and instead he T'd me up. SOme other shenanigans when on from him that game as well but thankfully for me a grandparent of a kid on the other team was a WPIAL officials evaluator as was watching. He talked to me after the game and got our 'tape'. He got that official banned from doing any game with our school and any sectional opponents. I jokes with that guy about getting another guy banned and his exact words were "yeah he's just as bad but my boss and he are friends, so he'll end up working at least 1 WPAIL finals".
BTW, current Duquesne womens hoops coach Dan Burt was one of the top officials during his time doing so back in the late 90's. Really good official.
When coaching HS hoops in PA 25 years ago I had an official who hated me because I always called him out about how he didnt know the rules and he was a 20 year vet. We had the seatbelt rule then and if a coach stood up, they had to take a TO or were assessed a T. I was calling for a TO and finally stood up so that he had to stop the game. I said I wanted a TO and instead he T'd me up. SOme other shenanigans when on from him that game as well but thankfully for me a grandparent of a kid on the other team was a WPIAL officials evaluator as was watching. He talked to me after the game and got our 'tape'. He got that official banned from doing any game with our school and any sectional opponents. I jokes with that guy about getting another guy banned and his exact words were "yeah he's just as bad but my boss and he are friends, so he'll end up working at least 1 WPAIL finals".
BTW, current Duquesne womens hoops coach Dan Burt was one of the top officials during his time doing so back in the late 90's. Really good official.
