JustRules

I never said they were perfect. There are going to be a couple calls each game that could have or should have been called differently. There are 160-180 plays per game. If there are 2-3 plays with incorrect calls That's a 98% accuracy rate. That's pretty amazing! The one I saw was I believe was on the other game and Steratore was the rules expert. The QB had scrambled and tackled downfield in the middle of other players. The only view that could likely see that hit was the overhead camera they showed. I don't believe any official would have had a view of that hit. So while they get a downgrade for not calling it, there was nothing they could have done differently to see it. But trying to get replay involved in those kinds of plays would cause more problems than solve as proven by the PI experiment a couple years ago. There are certain types of calls we need to leave with the officials on the field and accept a 98% accuracy rate. None of this changes the original point of our discussion. As much as you think you understand the rules, you don't know them as well as you think you do. The same is true for coaches and players and TV analysts. They will never have a perfect game, but the number of errors is much smaller than you realize. Since you are a former player and coach I assume you aren't doing either now. I would strongly encourage you to contact some local officials and join us. You may find out how fun and challenging this avocation is. You'll also find out how little you previously understood the rules. They are more complex than you realize but not something you can't easily learn with time and experience. The latter part is critical though because it takes repetition and study to be able to see the nuance of each call. And this goes well beyond fouls and non-fouls. That's a small portion of what we are looking at and judging on every play.

So true! Knowing what you don't know is often more important than knowing what you do know. I may have some ideas of what i would do if I were a coach, but I know every coach knows more about coaching than I do.

I have so many coaches screaming for holding on plays where it is obviously not holding to know coaches don't understand holding as well as they do. Some of that is because at the high school level we also have officials who call very ticky tack holding. We have to do better there. No official is perfect so you aren't wrong there. But they are also right a lot more than you think. I know it sounds condescending or arrogant to say coaches and players don't know or understand rules, but it's the absolute truth. Everyone assumes because someone played they know the rules, but when I have in depth rules discussions with someone they realize how little actually know. Once I learned I didn't know the rules of football until I became an official I realized I don't know the rules of baseball or basketball as well as I thought I did. That's why I ask officials in those sports when I see something I think is wrong. I always learn something. I was on the board for a local youth league and a situation arose where a runner was not called out when a batted ball hit him as he was running from 2nd to 3rd. I always thought that was an out. Not only did I learn that's not always the case, but it's also different in the various rule sets. HS is different than Babe Ruth is different than Little League is different than American Legion. And baseball and softball have different rules about it. I had two siblings of one of the players get in my face and argue they have been playing X years and were current college players and had never seen that called. Then they called their dad who who had coached for 30 years, and he insisted the umpire was wrong. Guess what? Every baseball umpire I talked to asked me the same question when I presented the scenario. Had the ball passed an infielder when the ball hit the runner? That was a key factor in every rule set and none of the players or coaches arguing had any idea that was a factor. Here's another great example, there are no fouls for "over the back" or "reaching in" in basketball but you hear announcers use it all the time. But as fans we all believe those acts are fouls.

Over the course of a season a referee may call roughing 5 or 6 times. Holding calls are subjective and involve judgement the fan or media may not understand. It's not just a grasp or a pull. What you think was missed is most likely not a miss. There are several philosophies and training videos to try to be as consistent as possible from official to official and crew to crew. At the HS and college level we have to put the hold into a category. I assume NFL guys use the same or similar philosophies (their defensive holding philosophies are much tighter than ours). It has to be a material restriction at the point of attack and had an impact on the play. Most of the missed holding complaints is missing one of those elements. Even then we could show the same play on video to 10 very good officials and there could be a split of opinion. It's not black and white so there will be some level of judgement. Fans will point to this point and say "see, the official the can pick the one he/she wants to get the outcome he/she wants." That's the last thing on their mind as they are making the decision. I know you won't believe that, but it's a very weird phenomenon. You don't think about which team is involved because you are focused on seeing what you need to see and making the best judgement you can in the moment based on what you saw. In this context you are correct that mistakes can be made for a variety of reasons, but they are definitely not intentional. They are human and not robots. But the number of blatant misses either way are rare. As the replay experiment with PI showed a few years ago, it creates more problems than it solves. The game is not perfect. The ball bounce funny. Receivers drop passes, defenders take a bad angle, runners carry the ball too loose and drop it. These are all the imperfections that make the game so unpredictable. Perfection is the enemy of great. We have great now and will never achieve perfection.

The point is more about people saying "this crew" or "that crew" calls things a certain way and they expect the same results in the postseason. If there are any tendencies in a crew they wouldn't exist in the post-season because the crew is not Huchuli's crew or Vinovich's crew so there is no connection to the tendency. And the tendency is more likely going to be tied to the games they were randomly assigned to work. The officials perceived performance is often determined by the number of crazy things that happen in the game. For example, in the first 5 plays in the Chiefs-Bills game they had an illegal bat and a missed illegal forward pass. Both are very strange and rare plays. Some games have much tougher calls than others and the more tough plays the more likely there are to be issues, real or perceived.

Articles like that prove how little some people understand how football and officiating work. First, the referee makes very few of the calls in a game. Their attention is so focused on the QB and kickers they often have no idea what the result of a play is. There isn't much they could do to "influence" a game or "favor" one team. Second, the crew he's working with in the playoffs is different than the crew he's working with in the regular season. So any "trends" someone may think to propose wouldn't apply because it's a different set of people. It would be like having Patrick Mahomes as your Pro Bowl QB and then predicting the AFC Pro Bowl defense is likely to give up a lot of points because the Patrick Mahomes-led Chiefs give up more points than any team in the league.

I haven't seen anything changing that stance yet but I don't have any inside information.

For teams like Center Grove and Carmel who have to fill a schedule without the benefit of a conference it may be the only way they can find opponents. Center Grove is opening at home with a team from Baltimore. They had a hard time finding an opponent. This at least gives them more options.

It's actually 6 of 7 (NFL only has 7 officials on the field). The one not assigned this week was the LJ. That doesn't mean he won't be assigned next week though. 4 of the 6 assigned are alternates this week which means they could get another assignment later in the playoffs as well. All this really proves is Schefter's speculation of a playoff ban the crew didn't actually happen.

Now the tripping call definitely looks like an error. The official was fooled somehow and had the wrong team/player doing the trip. That happens. Unfortunately nobody else saw it to take him off the call. I haven't had a chance to watch a version of the video I could slow down to see if there was some other action that could be considered tripping (I don't believe there is). This is what would actually be considered an officiating error and one big enough that it alone could keep an official from a playoff assignment. The reason why you see officials defend other officials is because most of the time the calls fans and media think are horrible errors actually are correct or at worst tight judgement calls. As for the actual requirements of reporting, this is possibly where the rule and philosophy may be slightly different. I've only seen articles report the requirement but not seen the actual wording of the rule. The video the NFL shared mentioned both but not sure if they were saying they both had to be done or they both are valid methods. Either way every report from the rules experts and former officials has said the signal is most commonly used. Most of the time you just see the lineman turn around in the huddle and swipe his chest and that seems sufficient. Based on the video 70 was not close enough to the R to verbalize his reporting so there is no disagreement there. But the R clearly responded to his signal considering it reporting. If that's not what 70 intended it's now on him to get that clarified. The R has no idea he's wrong and no idea 70 isn't going to line up in an eligible position at this point.

They absolutely do make mistakes. Most of the time those mistakes are caused by not having the best angle or getting fooled by what they saw. The only fault in this situation is if the R noticed there were 2 other players approaching him after he ruled 70 as the player reporting, he could have stopped to ask them if they had anything to add. But he never saw them or acknowledged them so 68 should have realized he never completed his reporting. And 70 clearly should have seen the referee point to him to acknowledge his signal. Detroit was intentionally trying to create confusion so they knew they weren't clear in what they were doing. But it is 100% on them to make sure the R knows who is reporting so the officials can correctly officiate the play. The R could have slowed down and possibly saved the Lions from their clumsiness and officials often are able to recognize and do that. But you can't fault them for something that is ultimately the responsibility of the team to execute clearly. I'll provide a good example. When we line up the teams for a kickoff, we'll never allow a kickoff to occur if each team doesn't have 11 players on the field. If they have 10 or 12 we'll let them know before the BJ and LJ leave the field. That's not our responsibility. The number of players on the field are the responsibility of the teams. Another example is getting players to line up before the snap. If there appears to be 5 in the backfield or an eligible number is covered and the wing can get the attention of the wideouts, he'll let them know he has them on or off. It's then up to the player to determine if they need to adjust, but these are all examples of preventative officiating. They aren't required and being unable to do it isn't an error by the official as the teams are ultimately responsible for being legal. So yes in this case, the referee could have possibly prevented the Lions from poor communication that resulted in a foul. But it's the players who ultimately needed to be more clear. This site provides a good summary of what happened. A key thing they have confirmed is the officials were graded as Correct Call for this specific play. This lines up with the two things released from the league this week. https://www.footballzebras.com/2024/01/final-analysis-of-the-lions-eligibility-reporting-scheme/

I don't have a copy of the NFL rule book, but we are fortunate to have several NFL officials in Indiana who know the rules. They've shared with me you can report either verblly or physically. Usually it's just one eligible player giving a quick signal to the R who then announces and tells the defense. They can verbally tell them as well. As long as they communicate. It's usually a very simple, uncomplicated thing. The Lions decided to get cute and it backfired. The referee likely didn't look for any additional people reporting because he knew there were 6 ineligible numbers on the field and 1 of them reported to him as ineligible. If you watch the all-22 video he gets the attention of the area shortly after he started moving from the sideline area. This was coming out of a time out. The Lions sent 11 players out and then swapped out 2 of them including 70. Yes, I guess you can say the referee "assumed" 70 was reporting, but it was because 70 gave him a clear "reporting" signal as he ran in from the sideline as he had done the entire game. I'm not blindly supporting the official. I'm just stating what you can clearly see on video.

I agree with your assessment. The R clearly communicates with 70. 70 is brushing his chest as he's running to the R so that is a form of reporting. He wasn't intending to actually report. Coach Campbell has admitted they were attempting to deceive the Cowboys defense so they didn't know who was reporting. There is nothing wrong with doing that, but I don't get why they would do it. The referee is going to tell the defense who reported so any deception goes away long before the they get lined up. It's 100% on the Lions to make sure the referee knows who is reporting. The R never acknowledged 68 but he did acknowledge 70 so even if they didn't hear the announcement on the PA of 70 reporting as eligible, 70 knew he was the one identified as eligible by the R. The referee had no idea he had the wrong number so I'm not sure how he can be faulted in any way here. If the Lions had made sure 68 was the one who was considered as reporting the play was perfectly legal.

There is a lot of preventative officiating that takes place throughout the game. Alignment is a key area where that takes place. Most wideouts do know to check with the wings when they get lined up, but not all do. A common question we'll get is "am I good?" usually referring to on or off the line. The challenge with that is we don't know which they are supposed to be. To be an eligible lineman you need to be breaking the waist of the snapper. The snapper's waist is about a yard behind the ball generally so if the ball is snapped at the B23, as long as part of your body is breaking the B24, you are considered on the line. To be a back you need to be behind the nearest lineman. Since that could be another eligible receiver or an interior lineman their waist could legally be the B25 using the previous example. But a wing back is often behind the waist of the snapper but breaking the waist of the tackle. And the wideouts may be one off/one on but both close enough the one who is off is not far enough back to meet the legal definition of a back. As long as they are staggered enough you'll put one on and one off. We use the term "make them legal". Where that can get tricky is if putting one of them back creates 5 in the backfield you have a foul for an illegal formation. Putting him on creates a covered up eligible number but legal formation. If the inside player goes downfield and there is a legal forward pass beyond the NZ you now have an ineligible receiver downfield and possibly illegal touching if he's the first to touch the pass. These are all possibly going to cause warnings the first time it's seen by that team. You'll want to warn both the players involved and their coach. But if both wideouts come out and indicate to the wing they are on or off you have no choice but to treat it that way. You need to be careful letting them know they need to move to be legal especially if the snap is imminent. If they move forward and the ball is snapped before they get set you have an illegal motion (moving forward at the snap). If they move back from the LOS and the ball is snapped before they get set you have an illegal motion (lineman in motion at the snap). As for lining up in the neutral zone, again you are going to be more lenient the further they are from the ball. Many receivers think they are fine if they are behind the front of the ball (the defense's line of scrimmage). In the example above with the nose of the ball on the B23, they'll line up with their toes close to the B23. If they are that close, we'll probably warn them the first time. I've told several receivers they need to be behind the BACK of the ball, and they are surprised. I then explain if they need to be on the line, they have a full yard they can line up and still be legally on the line if that's where they are supposed to be. The same courtesy is extended to the defensive line. If they are just breaking their side of the neutral zone, it's probably a warning and communicated through the umpire or referee to ask the DL to back up on the next play. The DBs often ask to make sure they are not in the neutral zone if they are trying to legally press the receiver. We'll let them know if they need to back up. In the KC play, you can see the ball is clearly behind the B49. It's likely the ball was spotted with the nose of the ball on the B49 so that would be the actual location of the neutral zone. If the snapper changes the position slightly especially tipping it like you see in the photo. Thanks to the lines on the field, you can see the receiver's foot is clearly beyond the back of the B49. This is what put him BEYOND the NZ. If he was 6 inches behind the B49 he's still technically in the NZ, but that's likely only a warning. I know the NFL has made this a point of emphasis this year so maybe they would still be expected to call it.

IP is such a harsh penalty for that action. This is one college gets right by treating it as illegal touching if that receiver is the first to touch a pass. And the penalty is only a loss of down at the previous spot essentially treating it like an incomplete pass. I agree it is hard to catch with only one wing on the sideline or the BJ on the end line when their focus could be somewhere else when the receiver touches OOB.

That play was a great example of why the wing official needs to be stationary and keep distance on the catch. He's moving so his eyes are bouncing as the catch is happening. Plus he's too close to have a good view of the ball and feet with the sideline. I saw wings running toward the catch all weekend despite the IFOA training videos telling them each week to hold or stay close to the line of scrimmage and if you drift be sure to be stopped at the mesh point. This was snapped inside the 15 so the wing is in a tough spot because they need to get into the end zone. But once it's obvious the receiver will be beyond the goal line at the catch, there is on reason for the wing to be on the goal line. Overall the officiating this weekend was excellent. We may have a faulty process to advance officials, but the process the past several years has put solid crews in the finals. There are many other crews who would do just as excellent, but there are only so many spots and it's hard for them to advance in the current system.

I hope you gave the R a lot of grief for announcing the numbers of the players involved. He probably had no idea he did that. 🤣

We have 6 very good crews working in the finals this weekend. 2 are working their 4th state final and 2 are working their 2nd. The other two are considered new crews, but most members on both crews have worked a state final with a different crew chief. This doesn't mean they'll get every call 100% right, but there is a good chance they will have excellent games. Looking forward to seeing all of them work.

Very unfortunate. This is actually really hard to catch on the field. You have to remember which players were lined up in ineligible positions. The snapper should be the easiest one because as an umpire you pay special attention to this number and confirm them every play. On tries and FGs he may be the only ineligible player with an eligible number. If you have any doubt about this as a crew don't leave the field until you discuss it. You put the CIF in a position where they can't change anything without setting a really bad precedent. I feel horrible for the losing team, but nobody feels worse than that crew especially knowing they had an opportunity to correct it but didn't do it at the time.

I've seen both teams this year and think BD is the better team. But CG is so well coached I wouldn't be surprised by either team winning. Should be a good one.

Warren's defense was legit all season. They have 4 D1 kids on the DL. I think at least 2 of them are returning next year. If they can get a QB they could be at the top again.

One good factor to consider on these plays is if the defender's actions appear to be a tackle or attempt to block a kick. And if he makes contact before the ball is kicked, then it's easy. This is more common though on a bad snap where it's not obvious if he's going to kick it.

Not from what I've heard. It doesn't matter how the ball was knocked OUT of the end zone. It's how it got there in the first place. It sounds like it was IU's fumble. A new impetus by rule only happens if the ball is at rest or nearly at rest. It's not a judgment call on whose contact caused the call to move from the field of play to the end one.

I'd also like to add "uncatchable" in the NFL and NCAA do not use the Webster definition of uncatchable. By philosophy it's really NOT catchable. For the HS eqivaletnt it would be a pass that lands on the track or 20 yards over the receiver's head. The Colts game Sunday is a good example. In order for that to be ruled uncatchable it likely needed to be thrown away in the stands. Steratore had a great explanation on the broadcast. It could definitely be discussed, but that was probably still too close to be considered uncatchable. Passing on a DPI in HS is going to more involve a pass thrown to a completely different receiver outside the area of the pass.

I'll also add the location of the tip is also important. If it's near the location of the receiver it doesn't absolve the defender of their PI action. Tips usually happen at or behind the NZ, but it could be somewhere mid-route if it's a low pass.