Game Control Question

[Forksref]

Originally Posted by Diikiey

During the course of a game, under Nebraska High School regulations, the game officials have control of the game, as far as penalties, personal fouls, and ejections are concerned.

At any point does the school administration or league officials have the ability to address the officials during the course of the game to let them know they were wrong in either ejecting, or not ejecting, players for personal fouls, or perceived dirty play?




I believe the game officials have control and may be addressed after the game is completed, in an official manner. There are others in the mentioned league who believe the administration must step in during the game to correct anything the officials are or are not doing.

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Comments? Questions? Any input is appreciated, trying to see what the professionals think of the scenario....

No.

Correct by not hiring them again. That is the option.

[Robert Goodman]

It's not satire unless you take it to be that. I'm just trying to clarify the issue by getting down to what proceeds from the fundamental assumptions. Apparently I need to make it more explicit for some of you.

Wouldn't you say sports officiating, whether you get paid or not, is a skilled kind of job that's turned over to experts for them to take charge of during the job? It shares that characteristic with other situations like doing construction or maintenance work. The job requires a certain degree of concentration and control that the expert needs to be effective. It doesn't go quite as far as, say, piloting a ship or plane or doing surgery wherein you have people's lives in your hands during the job and really, really can't be interrupted midway. Maybe a closer analog might be musicians doing a public or private performance as part of an orchestra, where an interruption and change of course would likely be deleterious but not catastrophic, but it has certain things in common with the construction work that may be more likely to come up.

You're in a situation where someone, the customer, has engaged you for this work. You had an understanding that the work would be done at a given place and time according to certain known regulations, in this case those of a state HS ***'n regarding football. Those regs include not only the conduct of the game but even the meta-consideration of what aspects of the proceedings the officials have control of, such as who gets to talk to whom. This is not much different from someone asking you to install something in a bldg. on a schedule where it's also undergoing other work. It is not unheard of for the customer in such a case to suddenly, in the middle of the job, demand a deviation from the standard that the contractor was following. Some of the work has already been done, and if the new understanding is not agreed to between the customer and the contractor, if the contractor quits the job there needs to be some equitable settlement regarding payment.

Similarly here. In the middle of the game the customer demands that you deviate from the regulations that were originally understood to apply according to your agreement with him. You might walk off the job or you might continue according to what the customer now wants.

In a case like a football game, depending on the organiz'n that's putting it on, it may not be immediately obvious who the customer is. A particular administrator may have authority over the game sufficient to cancel or alter it at any moment, or responsibility for it may be diffused within the organiz'n such that there is no single boss with authority to do any arbitrary thing about it at any time.