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Pete:
My primary officiating is HS and JC football, while I umpire many more HS and youth baseball games. My take is that football is much more fun, challenging and much easier on the temperament.
Flank officials can hear the coaches, but generally not the fans. Further, the culture is different; baseball tolerates harassment, and football doesn't. The penalties are so different: 15-yard dead-ball unsportsmanlike foul can really hurt a team, while warnings and ejections in baseball not only rarely hurt but are used by coaches to inspire! By the end of an extended baseball season, I'm yearning for football.
As you're one of the great baseball rules guys, I'd be interested in your take on rules mastering. To me, football rules are so much harder than baseball to really learn, especially penalty enforcement. And, there is so much more judgment that must be applied in football penalty-calling. For instance, I used a football-rules-judgment analogy on the baseball forum when at issue was calling a minor infraction (barely missing home plate after a game-winning homerun) that only the umpire can see, and I was lambasted in ad hominem tones for suggesting that a foul such as football holding should not be called if no disadvantage is gained.
Next, football officiating is an amateur avocation. Even guys that advance to the NFL have other main careers, as opposed to baseball umpires that must make it their careers to advance. And I don't know about other organizations, but I find our HS baseball organization so much more political and subjective in ratings than in our football organization.
Lastly, my HS varsity football games have thousands of fans watching, while my HS varsity baseball games have less than one hundred. The youth football games I do on Saturdays have more spectators than most HS varsity baseball games I do. So the pure pleasure in officiating in football cannot be discounted.
Any how, that is my take. I'm sorry for the lengthy response, but I have many times used my lawyer mind to analyze why I so much more enjoy football officiating--and you're the first one to ever ask! (I pitched two years in college, but only played football through HS--so it's not that I played more football.) If you do start officiating football, please share your thoughts between that and baseball.
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