Game Management Thought
 

I have this hypothesis:

At the highest levels of professional sports, officiating becomes less and less about rules and more and more about game management.

In other words, the rules of the game become less important and managing the way these professional athletes play and managing to a certain extent the crowd and managing through communication the coaches all become primary.

I've wondered how easily a transition from one sport to another a referee would make at the highest levels. Would an NBA official be able to transition to NHL (assuming of course the referee could skate) solely based on his management skills? Or an NFL official to FIFA? etc etc.

I'm a relatively new official, so I may be way off base with these thoughts. Do any of the veteran officials have any thoughts on this?

I think play accuracy, at least at the pro level is most important (at least at the NBA level and I'd assume it's the same in other sports). That's not to say game management isn't important. You're expected to deal with players and coaches with the biggest stakes on the line. But ultimately, if all your games have no issues, yet your play calling isn't up to par, you probably aren't going to stick around for long.

Precisely. Every single call/no-call in every game at those levels is reviewed for accuracy. You can bet that the official that gets the calls wrong more the the others is penalized...if not for each error then eventually as they are eventually not retained. And I'm not talking about rules....I'm talking about judgement....yes, they are graded on whether they made the right call as far as the league guidelines dictate. As for rules, they get fined if they get a rule wrong.

The reason, Toren, that it appears to become less and less about the rules is that they just don't get rules wrong much and all that is left is game management.

It does become more and more about game management. It does NOT become less and less about rules.

I've met a few NFL officials at some of the clinics/meetings that I've attended. At one point, one of them went over the grading process they go through for every play of every game.

I don't remember all the details, but I do remember that, in order to be 'playoff qualifed' (which doesn't mean quite what you think... if you miss the cut for being playoff qualified 3 times, you get let go), the Umpire (who has the most margin for error of all the officials, due to the fact that he has the most players to watch on any given play), has to be correct 98.75% of the time. Deep officials (FJ, SJ, BJ) have to be correct 99.5% of the time.

I'm sure the NBA, NHL, MLB, FIFA, etc all have similar grading systems in place.

The takeaway: if you think a pro-level official got the call wrong... he/she almost certainly didn't.

+1 Makes perfect sense.

Wow that's a daunting thought:eek:

We have three NFL Officials in an association I belong to and they talk all the time about how they are graded on plays and the type of things they get downgraded for, even when they are not directly involved. It happens at the college D1 level as well. It does not appear to be as common at the D1 Basketball level, but it is getting there. The problem in college basketball are there are so many games and officials that they do not seem to review every play like the NBA yet and they certainly do not tell the officials the way they do in the NBA what they got right or wrong (at least in the same way).

Peace

I started doing JV baseball last spring after 10+ years in basketball and soccer. Learning the rules was the hardest part. The game management skills definetely spill over into other sports. Some of the JV umpires I was working with would warn me about how brutal the coaches could be, but I found that compared to Basketball coaches, they were nothing. Those umpires were amazed on how quickly and easily I could diffuse situations they would back away from.

I would disagree... Rules knowledge is paramount to officiating. No assignor will send you out if you don't know the rules. Your assignor can defend questionable judgment on a play, but not incorrect application of rules. I would contend it gets MORE important the higher you move up as one rules mistake can end a career. I have seen this happen many times to colleagues.

The higher you move up game management is expected as well as dealing with coaches. These skills are often what seperates the great from the good.