The NFL requires it, John McGrath has it, all NCAA conference supervisors desire it.

Integrity.

Success in sports is familiar territory to John McGrath. Once the Kentucky High School Athelete of the Year, football scholarship recipient to the University of Kentucky then later the Kentuckiana Football Officials Association Rookie of the Year, John still remains humble and thankful to those that helped him obtain his current position as Tony Corriente’s Head Linesman.

So where did Integrity come into play in John’s career? Well as John was getting started officiating high school football he had a chance to work some small college games. One of John’s mentors, Paul Schmidt; asked John to join him in a Independant Officials group which would work NCAA games for those independant schools not affiliated with a major conference (pre-conference USA). The acceptance date was in January. Now John had been applying to enter the SEC for several years and this was no different. Problem was the SEC didn’t decide until mid February. John went ahead and accepted Paul’s offer in January.

Guess who called in February? You got it, the SEC. They offered John a position on an SEC crew. After a 24 hour wait, John called the SEC back and declined the job. He had already given his word to Paul. Now you might think…WHAT? Turn down the SEC? No way, man!

John officiated  in the Independant group for one year and then it folded. He was now without a major conference. So he applied and was eventually accepted to the Big East where he worked ten years (and in nine bowl games).

Later, John was called to New York City to interview for the NFL. During the NFL, several of the interview committee inquired as to why John turned down the SEC. His response, “I gave the man my word.” And  John firmly believes that was a determing factor in his being hired to the NFL.

Integrity is one of those intangible qualities you can’t teach, train or demand it be there. It shows up in the toughest decisions, the trying times, moments that define you as an official. It’s also completely under your control…And when you think no one notices, your decisions from the past are brought back up for inspection and review. Just be sure they don’t haunt you.

Here’s a part of my interview with Allen Baynes. Allen just completed his rookie season in the NFL on Tony Corriente’s crew. Allen was previously on crews in the Conference USA and Arena 1 Football before getting the call to move up to the NFL.

I asked Allen about what a typical week was for him as an NFL official. Here’s what Allen had to say:

TODD: Let’s just talk about Monday leading up to Sunday. What happens in a typical week of Allen Baynes?

ALLEN: Okay, well, it’s Monday I will usually, it’s kind of slow. I’m usually getting in from a late flight. I’m either getting in from a late flight on Sunday night or I am getting home, if it’s a late ballgame on Sunday I can’t get home on Sunday night, then I’ll take the first flight home on Monday morning to kind of get back to work and get settled in a little bit. I will finish the TV tape. At the end of the games we get a copy of the TV tape so we’ve got laptop computers, so I immediately start looking at that film and breaking that film down, and making notes of any plays or any concerns that I have. Mainly it’s my position but we’ll look at and just kind of make some notes on other plays and concerns that come up from the game. We’ll usually try to go to the gym and get some exercise, work out; I’m a little sore or whatever from the game the day before. We’ll go work out and do some stretching, stuff like that
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Tuesday comes and we get, each week we get a copy of a DVD from the teams. And it is the coach’s tape, which is a sideline shot and an end zone shot of each play, of offense, defense and special teams. So we’ve got that tape to look at. And normally on Tuesday I will go back and look at the plays that I’ve marked from the TV tape to look at other angles of the plays and concerns that I have from the game. And then Tuesday night we will get our grade report from our supervisor, and normally they email out a preliminary report of what we did good and a couple plays that might not have been so good. They will make comments on those and obviously, those will be downgrades if they viewed something as wrong. If we called something that was not correct that’ll be an incorrect call. And if we didn’t call something that wasn’t there, or was there and we didn’t’ call it that’ll be a no call. So we get that report.

Now in our league we can respond to the downgrades, so each official will take the downgrades and go look at the TV tape and take a look at the coach’s tape that we sent. And we’ll normally send in comments to our referee and our referee will respond to the grades that we got. And whether we agree or it’s something that… Sometimes an angle that we see from one shot will show that we got the call right when they say we got it wrong. Then the league will report back to us on Wednesday. They’ll give us a final report on our grades, whether they’re going to stick with their initial grade, which is what they do most of the time, or every now and then they might say, “You’re right, we agree that that call is graded correctly.”

TODD: Do you start with a score of say, 100, at the beginning of the game and then you work your way down?

ALLEN: No.

TODD: How does the downgrading score process work?

ALLEN: We get… Yeah, we get points for good calls. If you get a downgrade for anything, if you throw a flag for a defensive pass interference and it’s not a defensive pass interference, you get an incorrect call; you get a minus 10. And then if you get a no call, which is not throwing a flag when you should have, you get a minus 6. And then you can also get a partially correct call, which is them saying, “Okay, we’ll go with you here but we don’t really like it too much,” you can get t a minus 2. Now they take all your points and they average them. You’ve got the number of plays and your number of… It’s actually a little bit complicated, and to me as a rookie I didn’t really get too deep into it. I didn’t care except looking at what they said to call or not call. Didn’t really get into the grading process that much as far as how it works and the points. But they basically divide your number of plays by your downgrades and that’s how they come up with the score for you.

TODD: Okay. And then just so we understand that, the scoring then is used for playoff selection and ranking of the officials by position?

ALLEN: Yes.

TODD: Okay. And now I would also assume that is also used as a training tool to help you improve. They wouldn’t, it’s not just simply to rank you; they want you to get better, right?

ALLEN: Absolutely. It’s not totally just negative, “You did this wrong.” They will point out good things that were done and comments about mechanics, things like that. And good decisions that were made, so it’s not all just bad grade reports. They will put some comments on good things as well.

Officiating at the professional level is serious business. You obviously must be at the top of your game to get the opportunity, but more importantly…to remain at that level. The NFL has very detailed systems to monitor and evaluate their officials and I would like to note that these systems are designed to improve the level of officiating. Every NFL official I’ve spoken with has remarked on the support they receive from the league which helps them become better officials. You might think that once you make it to the NFL you have arrived. Well, you may have arrived, but best of the best firmly believe that continuous improvement is critical to staying there.

You can reserve your copy of my upcoming book at www.profootballreferee.com/training