Quote:
Originally posted by Sleeper
Isn't comparing officials from different sports kind of like comparing apples to oranges to pears to grapefruit, etc? Can this comparison be legitimately made?
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Yes, it probably is comparing apples to oranges. And as Rut pointed out, it's not really fair to compare. But I wasn't looking for "fair"; I was just looking for something fun to think about during the off-season.
In the large sense, it's reasonable to try to compare the one thing that all officials must do: exercise judgment to fairly apply the rules of their game. Officials from each different sport have a different way of doing this. But the bottom line for any crew in any sport is, did they get the calls right?
The reason I ranked NFL referees first is that they get a lot more help from one another than any of the other sports' officials. I think that's a huge help to them. One of the reasons I put MLB umpires lower is that I think, as a body, they are not very consistent with the balls and strikes. That's an incredibly difficult part of the game to call, it's a very important part of the game, and yet they get no help at all from their partners.
So the question was really just trying to generate some discussions of what makes each sport difficult to officiate and how the various officials are able to deal with it.
Chuck