[OverAndBack]

I still just don't think you can microwave your officiating career.

I mean, I know just from my experience that I'm considered a wuss because I felt that doing 22 or 25 games two seasons ago was a lot for me. But based on the time I had to devote to it and the other things in my life, that was it for me. That was all I could do.

Then I have the notion (which I expressed at the time), that while I think you can do 85 games a year (of course you can), can you really do justice to 85 games a year? Is it physically possible to be up for this 85 times a fall if you do other things? Are you getting 85 games worth of benefit out of your 85 games? Or is it just slogging through them?

If I took a brand-new, never-officiated before guy and gave him (unrealistically), 80 games his first year, would that make him 4 times better than someone who did 20 games? Would he necessarily be four times further along? I know there's no substitute for reps and making mistakes and learning from them, but is it realistic to say that without sufficient time to reflect and gather feedback, to let situations sit in your mind, to take in the counsel of others and to do the educational components necessary to really improve, that there aren't diminishing returns here? That after the 40th or 50th game, you're not getting that much more out of it in that particular season?

I don't know. That's just my theory. I think that you can't make yourself into a fourth-year official simply by doing four years' worth of games (for some guys) in one fall any more than you can make yourself a college senior by taking 80 hours your freshman year. You need to grow (up and older), you need to reflect, you need to take it in and process it, and I think some of that time is taken up just by driving from one field to another, washing your uniform for the fifth time that week or any of the other procedural things that just....take....time.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.