How many officials are there?

[sj]

Does anybody know approximately how many football officials there are nationwide?

Thanks

[Rick KY]

In KY, there were 572 officials who took the part II exam.

[JugglingReferee]

~ 600 in Ontario. Less than that in the rest of Canada. ~ 17 in PEI.

[bisonlj]

I believe there are about 800 hs varsity officials in Indiana and I would estimate another 25-50 licensed officials who are not on a varsity crew. The number would be slighly larger if you included college or pro officials that do not work high school.

[MJT]

This year 1581 certified FB officials in Iowa.

[AndrewMcCarthy]

From some numbers I've seen it sounds like around 130 officials for every 1 million in population is about right. This seems to jive for our association and for other numbers I've seen (but the Iowa number above seems way high for some reason).

If you use that you'd get 39,000 football officials in the US.

I would think the NF would have a number- I wonder how that compares.

[MJT]

Originally Posted by AndrewMcCarthy

From some numbers I've seen it sounds like around 130 officials for every 1 million in population is about right. This seems to jive for our association and for other numbers I've seen (but the Iowa number above seems way high for some reason).

If you use that you'd get 39,000 football officials in the US.

I would think the NF would have a number- I wonder how that compares.

I got it from our state rep. His email said 1600, and I looked on the website, put the entire list in Excel, did a filter to get only the FB officials to get the exact number. Before I did that, I emailed him back and asked him if that was only football. About the same time I got my research done, he sent me a reply saying, and I quote "we have over 5200 registered officials in our state at our office."

[mikesears]

Illinois has 2258 licensed high school football officials as of the latest available list.

[AndrewMcCarthy]

Originally Posted by mikesears

Illinois has 2258 licensed high school football officials as of the latest available list.

That's around 175 per million people.

[Texas Aggie]

An educated guess is that there are between 3500 and 4000 football officials (HS -- TASO) in Texas.

[Bob M.]

REPLY: After polling my friends in the other NJ chapters, there are about 950 football officials here.

[HossHumard]

I must admit I’m a bit gobsmacked over the numbers you guys are throwing around. If JugglingReferee’s estimate of 1000 in Canada is close to accurate (I’d guess it is), and you use the 10 times rule for all things US/Cdn, than the 39,000 estimate posted for the entire US is FOUR times the ratio south to north of the 49th!

My question is, with 40,000 of you guys working in the US, how on earth does a guy make it to the NFL? Those are tough odds from where I sit…

[Mike22Official]

Not all officials are shooting for the NFL. I'd be willing to say that 90-95% of current football officials in the US have no ambition of making it to the NFL.

[JugglingReferee]

Originally Posted by Mike22Official

Not all officials are shooting for the NFL. I'd be willing to say that 90-95% of current football officials in the US have no ambition of making it to the NFL.

That's a lot of heartache.

[Mike22Official]

Originally Posted by JugglingReferee

That's a lot of heartache.

I'm just saying that they probably have no intent of trying to make it to the NFL. You can count me as one of them.