Quote:
Originally Posted by RichMSN
It amazes me how many crews in this area go out and work on Friday nights with a very poor understanding of rules, case plays, and especially penalty enforcement.
I talked to a coach prior to a playoff game last week (I was the WH). He works college basketball and *gets* officiating. We have a common officiating friend/colleague (who posts here) and he told me of 3 or 4 enforcements this season that simply befuddled him. As an assistant coach, he wasn't able to convince the head coach to take a time out for a conference and, like he said, if the WH enforced the penalty wrong in the first place, who's to say he would be convinced by the head coach anyway?
Since the main factor in playoff assigning is "coach rating" here, some of those crews will be working deep into the playoffs. I saw on the highlights last week a crew that had a wing position himself on the numbers when the ball was snapped on the opposite hashmark. In the same set of highlights, I saw another crew where a wing didn't go straight to the goal line with a ball snapped at the 4 and ended up signaling a TD from the 2 yard line.
Last season we worked a first round playoff game where the visiting team (from another area) came out on offense and only had 4 players with numbers 50-79 in the game. Flag. Next play: Another flag. Then I got the linesman to get the coach to take a timeout so we could get this fixed before the game became a farce. All season the crews working their games ignored the numbering rules or just didn't know them or pay attention to them.
In other words, nothing surprises me anymore.
But I'm trying to make things better. I've been the football meeting coordinator of my association for the past two years and I've shown a lot of video and tried to get people talking and learning. But we're a state where association membership is only "recommended" and has no relation to assigning or playoff eligibility. So most of the people that are there are ones that already do things right or really want to. When in Rome....
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It's a shame we don't work and live closer together....I've echoed these sentiments for years. As we discussed, there's crews I know well that let a QB off the hook in HS for grounding the ball OOB because he's out of the tackle box. Astounding is putting it lightly...and they can't figure out why they never get a playoff assignment, or deeper than Level 1 anyway.