I think those are fair comments for a former coach.

Teams often practice less towards the end of the season so that the players will be fresh for the games. It makes sense that officials could benefit by getting extra rest towards the end of the season.

The contract is with Conference A. How can that contract say that an official can't work for Conference B the night before or after?

I assign 20 boys HS teams and 18 girls HS teams -- while I can use whoever I want, how can I even begin to KNOW where someone else is working the other nights of a week?

It's easy, you put it in your contract that if they work for you, then they can't work for any other conference.

Of course, you're going to have to then start withholding taxes, setting up a worker's comp plan, etc. Because you've just made them employees. :D

Quite a few officials would get rid of that conference, then.

Conferences already have the choice of not hiring the guy working 90+ games a season. Then they hire them anyway.

Isn't it all about performance? If a guy has a noticeable drop in production at the end of the season for this reason (or any other reason for that matter) won't this problem take care of itself?

Very easy. The people writing the contracts can have just about any stipulation they want. They can't say the official can't ever work for the other conference without getting into the employer/employee area. But, they could easily say that the contract for Game X begins 36 hours before the game time and can specify what the official is expected to do or not do during the contracted time. They already do that to some degree by requiring arrival at the site a couple hours before the game and arrival in the city by a certain time. There really is no reason additional commitment times couldn't be added.

If not all conferences to it, they might have to offer more pay for the extended contract requirements but most of the big conferences could easily afford that if they really wanted to ensure the officials were not working every day, day after day. Even if they don't pay more and all the big games have the same terms, being able to work only 3-4 $1000-2000+ games a week really isn't a hardship at that level.

Maybe not at the high school level, but, at the D1 level, knowing where others is pretty easy (if someone needed/wanted to know) when pretty much every game is televised somewhere and their are databases out there that track which officials worked where.

Crystal Ball ...
 

Slightly off topic, but my Catholic middle school assigner can "see" our high school games on Arbiter to avoid scheduling conflicts. We allow him to do this by "telling" Arbiter to show him our high school schedule. It doesn't work the other way around, our high school assigner can't see our Catholic middle school assignments. My Catholic middle school assigner has a policy that high school assignments take priority over his middle school assignments.

You control that. There is a sharing option under your profile.

One of the low level college (D2, I think) conferences around here has restricted their football officials from working high school football. We lost a few of our high school guys when that happened.

And this is what it comes down to.

Yes, I remember reading about that. Rocky Mountain Conference, or something like that.

Yep, RMAC.

I think the real problem would be one of collusion. If the conferences somehow got together and decided to individually institute some sort of restrictions on outside activity against their contractors, I'm not sure that would be legal. Is there an anti-trust exemption for college sports?

No, I think any kind of exemption went out the door back in the 80's when college football started making its way to multiple broadcasters.

I was thinking there was no exemption, which means the conferences could get into trouble for colluding. They could easily find any contractual restrictions unenforceable.

Not that they couldn't decide not to hire the guys next year if they violate the contracts this year. But the guys who are getting 90 games a year are getting them for a reason.

One potential avenue would be for the NCAA to simply state anyone who works more than 75 (pick a number, really) NCAA games in a season is ineligible for post-season work. The guys who want to work in the tournament would suddenly police this themselves.