Heartland Conference

So let’s quickly revisit Larry Synder’s list of “What It Take To Be A Great Football Official.”

Study Rules of the Game

• Rule Book
• Tests & Quizzes
• Ask Other Officials
• Quiz a Buddy
• Never Stop Learning

Study Mechanics of Game

• CCA Mechanics Manual
• Camps & Clinics
• Philosophy
• Attend area meetings/rules study groups (Do any of you do this now?)
• Surround yourself with better officials
• Its hard to soar with the eagles, when you are surrounded by turkeys.

Part Two

• Watch film – the single biggest factor to rapidly improving your learning and accelerating your advancement. Countless seasoned NCAA and NFL veterans have pointed out to me during their interviews that film review tremendously improved their abilities. In some ways you can consider watching film as a close substitute for snaps. Granted, nothing will take the place of live play, but watching film can definitely add a different perspective while adding to your experience level. Some have suggested that it can advance your learning by a factor of four! What this means is that you can shave three years off your experience level if you are trying to get promoted to a higher level. An aspiring motivated official with 4 years of experience (1 of which was heavy on film review) is similar to an official with 7 years experience (no film review). How do you think guys get into the NFL at age 34? You can bet they spent time in front of a TV reviewing film.

• Experience – How much is enough? Larry is very clear here. Get as much experience on the field as possible. This means youth league, spring and fall scrimmages, junior varsity games, varsity games at the high school level and then basically the same process at the college level. When making the transition to college, you will find conference supervisors are looking for those individuals that are willing to take the scrimmage and JV games. They want a prospect to have a few games under their belt before putting them on the field. There truly is no substitute for experience. I have personally stood on teh sidelines behind seasoned Division I officials just to ask questions, watch from that angle and get a feel for the speed and quickness of the game at the higher levels. Without a doubt, this helped me in my first scrimmage giving me a small comfort level (that is, until the whistle blew!).

• What You Have Control Over – This was the cornerstone of Larry’s list. I hear often, officials at all levels, complain that they can’t get the good games, they can’t get the supervisor’s attention, can’t get noticed and so on… You can probably name a few in your local associaiton or area too. So let’s look at that statement. What can we control? Well for one, I can control my ability to study and know the rules and mechanics of the game. I can use the rule book, study groups, practice or scrimmage activity to really and fully know the rules. I can stay in good physical conditioning. This will allow me to get into position, be quick and react in a timely manner. It will help me look athletic in my uniform. Let me be clear – The Division I conferences have a ZERO tolerance for officials out of shape or overweight. Coaches and players prepare year around for the season. The zebras are no exception. Just take a look at the NFL staff. The athleticism and physical fitness is at its highest level. Its that important.  Attend every learning opportunity you can. Clinics, camps, rules study groups, association meetings, scrimmages, film sessions. While not necessarily consistent across the board, learning opportunities still abound in various forms in every city, state or region. Whether you take advantage of them or not is another topic.

So that’s all for my comments on Larry’s philosophy. I personally know several officials that have been mentored by Larry and they are all performing at the highest levels today. They will all admit that the process wasn’t easy and often times the requirements were not what they wanted to hear. Yet the followed the path and Larry led them in the right direction.

This post is getting long so I’m going to save my next story for tomorrow. It’s about how I applied Larry’s philosophy to gain entrance into the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

Be the Best on the Field!

Todd

I arrived at the stadium early as suggested by several, actually I was the first to hit the locker room. I had to find Coach Brohm to unlock the door and let me inside. Rumor had it that over 100 recruits and their families were on hand to watch teh scrimmage. Louisville closed the scrimmage to outsiders so the stands mostly empty.

My fellow officials began to arrive shortly after I did. It was rather chilly that day so we agreed to wear long sleeve shirts. Knickers had already been called earlier in the week. I had already shined my shoes the night before (a pregame ritual with me) so my uniform was in order. I also packed about 1000 butterflies in my stomach as well!

I hit the field with 8 other officials from the Big East (2), Sunbelt (1), Ohio Valley (2), Mid South (1) and two rookies (me included). Kavin McGrath, Big East HL and brother to John McGrath (NFL), was the organizer of the officials and had asked me where I wanted to work. My preference is the line of scrimmage but I also wanted to get a few snaps in at SJ/FJ too. Tommy Walsh made it almost to the field  before he realized he was missing a hat! Too funny.

One thing that concerned me was my lack of experience with NCAA mechanics. See that’s not something that’s easy to find, or to read up on. I did however, have a chance to review the rulebook and we covered the proposed 2009 rule changes prior to taking the field. So I followed John McGrath’s  advice: Get behind on of the veterans and ask questions. So I parked myself on the sideline behind Tommy Walsh from the Big East and did exactly that. Soaked it up.

Before I knew it, Tommy turned towards me and motioned me to the side line. Fortunately I had the Defense on my side so most of the coaching staff were located opposite of me. I still remember Tommy’s advice: “remember…they might be a little bit bigger, a little bit faster, but its still just football.” That helped calm my nerves…a little bit.

The first couple of plays were runs and relatively easy. The mechanics here are basically the same as high school. Then the Offense came out and lined up in the shotgun. Pass play. Something didn’t look  right on my side. Now Tommy had explaining how he counts players on his side of the ball. This was a little new to me so it took some time to process. I had been working on repeating my “SNAP, TACKLE, BACK” chant in my head while I counted  the players. Trying to gain some form of brain repetition with regards to football officiating. I also was learning my keys during  this time. But as I said before, something on this play didn’t look right but I must admit, the snap happened before I figured it out. Bad move.

You  see, rookie officials are not the only people on the field battling the butterflies. Seems WR’s have similar issues as well especially with regards to formations. The WR on my side was covering up the TE and upon the snap, guess what happened? You got it, they both released downfield. I missed it. No yellow flag on the ground to enunciate  the penalty. But the defensive coaching staff didn’t miss it!!! I then got my first taste of Big East ear-chewing, but you can bet I didn’t miss that again the rest of the day!

So I alternated with Tommy a few more series then Kavin McGrath came over from the LJ  side to work with me. Tommy moved back to Side Judge and I had the chance to brush up on the finer points of working the Line of Scrimmage from not one but two outstanding Big East officials. it was great just to be in an environment where I could immediately ask another official about a play, situation, possible penalty or otherwise.

So three hours later, the scrimmage came to a close. After the first few series, the butterflies subsided and I found I was really enjoying myself. It was a great experience, one filled with many learnings, some good laughs and a few mistakes from which I will not soon forget. When you are passionate about the game of football, surrounded by the comraderie of fellow officials and sharing the field with the best of the best, I couldn’t help but feel very fortunate for the chance to don the knickers in March.

August can’t come soon enough.

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
.

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