Four’s Company ...

[Nevadaref]

Originally Posted by BryanV21

So the officials get very little, if any, work doing 3-man mechanics before the biggest games of the year?

Yeah... that makes a ton of sense.

In many of the areas that make the switch to 3-person for the playoffs or the latter rounds of the postseason the lack of experience with the system is solved by bringing in college officials to work those contests.
Most of those officials will have worked significantly fewer high school games during the season than a high school-only official and the college game is called a little differently too. So this leads to a debate on the fairness of assigning playoff games to such officials. Does the association/state office reward the HS official for all of his effort the whole season or does it put the guy more familiar with the 3-person system out there for the biggest games of the year? What do the coaches want? I've heard the coaches complain that the playoff games are called differently from the regular season contests. I believe that they are correct, but I don't think that they fully grasp why. The explanation is two-fold. First, having a third official allows the crew to observe more and so more gets whistled. Secondly, the officials are mostly not the same people that they've seen all season. The college officials do call the game somewhat differently as they are used to emphasizing different aspects.