This Week in Off-Topic: Perfect or Not, the Real Officials Are Back

The lockout is over, and as Ed Hochuli signals, IT'S GOOOOOOOD!
Photo Credit: SportsGrid

Thankfully, the NFL and the officials union have reached a settlement in their labor impasse. Real officials will be back for tonight's game between the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens will be especially thankful because they felt the partial brunt of one of the most brutally and incompetently officiated games of the year to date Sunday night against the New England Patriots. The league will never admit that that game and the one succeeding it on Monday night was the combination one-two combo straw that broke the camel's back, but I have my suspicions.

With their old jobs restored, the league officials come back with all the scrutiny and attention in the world on them. The replacement refs were so bad that some of the rhetoric coming from people like myself may have seemed to be effusive praise for men excellent at their jobs to the point where failure was not an option for them. That is not the case. The regular officials are going to screw up just by the very nature of some of the calls they have to make. People are going to bitch and moan about pass interference and other judgment calls because they are judgment calls. That being said, in the wake of the destructive interpretation of the rules employed by the scabs, the old refs are going to be expected to be perfect.

Now's as good a time as any to say that's impossible and unreasonable to expect. Everyone knows that the referees were never a beloved group of men to begin with. When they're good at their jobs, they're invisible at best and only messengers of violation at worst. Their most egregious mistakes are magnified because they happen so few and far between, and we only name them when they screw up in those instances. Sometimes, it takes a steep decline in quality to realize what we had wasn't so bad.

However, just because they will screw up doesn't mean that we should throw our hands up in the air when that happens. The biggest lesson to be learned here is that everyone needs accountability, including the officials. When players, coaches or other front office employees screw up, they have to answer to someone. When an officiating crew messes up, the league often penalizes the people who criticize them for doing so. We know NFL needs to maintain credibility and authority, but insisting blatantly clear mistakes were not such, or even worse, admitting fault and only issuing a half-baked apology is not justice enough, especially when players can be fined substantial amounts of money for hits that might be legal given full context.

The regular officials need to have some kind of recourse against them for their mistakes, and it needs to be public. Everything else the league does is transparent, so why should critiquing and remediation of the mistakes of what are its most important employees not affiliated with any single team be clandestine? The system only works when admissions of imperfection are out in the open so we can work on becoming closer and closer to the unattainable perfection.

Again, I'm glad the officials are back to work, but this isn't a cure-all for the league. Officials need to be open to criticism and their mistakes must be admonished and rectified. That being said, I'm far happier to be riled up by judgment calls or to have one egregious misinterpretation of the rules happening per season rather than the specter of flag-happy replacement officials penalizing every play because of their unsurety and blow at least one major call per game.