There's a loaded sentence for you. When you hear that, you know that officials are just about to get criticized, and usually for a good long while, and in colorful terms that call their parentage into question.
The problem is, they're deserving of said criticism at an alarming level. South Carolina high school football officials remind me a lot of that little girl in the old nursery rhyme. When they're bad, they're horrid. That's not a scathing indictment of officiating as a whole. It's just a comment that a lot of these guys could get together and do a lot better a lot of the time. Let's take the game I went to last week, just for a fun example. There were several holds and motions and other things that were questionable but could be chalked up as just some Week Zero rustiness. Heck, I had to check on stats a half-dozen different times, and miscalculated a few in addition. It was Week Zero for everybody. There was one, however, that was particularly egregious. Team A uncorks a snap deep over the punter's head. Punter valiantly tracks it down, unwisely decides to punt anyway, and somehow gets it off. The ball files 10 or so yards about six feet off the ground. Now, remember the errant snap. The kick is nowhere NEAR the line of scrimmage. I mean, it's not in the same ZIP code. It's got maybe 20 more yards to go to make the line. So Team B knocks it around a few times, Team A gets a hand or two on it, and Team A eventually ends up covering the ball deep in their own territory. Bad news for them, right? Nope. After a brief huddle, the officials award Team A the ball. For what reason, I'm still not certain. I guess it was treated as a muffed punt, which is all fine and good, but THE BALL DIDN'T GET BACK TO THE LINE OF SCRIMMAGE. What it did was change the game. Team B was deprived a possession on which it most certainly would have scored. I say that because unless they turned it over (which they did with alarming regularity), they scored. They were never stopped. So all that momentum went away with the extra possession, and they lost by 5. The collective blogging panel has a couple of “official friends”. That's what we call them, anyway. Listeners/readers who are football officials and keep us in the know. I knew it was trouble when I got a text early this week. “I saw that call you were talking about on Saturday,” it said. “They blew it.” They most certainly did. And it happens too often. I'm far from perfect. These things will frequently be rife with typos. But if James or Travis tells me to change something, I change it. I've got the good sense to listen to somebody else who might've had a better look at it than I had. That's at least part of the problem. The VAST majority of those guys (and maybe gals, I think there were a couple female football officials last time I checked) are very good at what they do. But everybody makes mistakes. There's a fine line between confidence, which is needed to be a good official, and arrogance, which is decidedly not. Some folks can't quite find that line, and the inability to be wrong, or even to be questioned in some cases, leads to situations like the one I saw last Friday. In the words of a whole bunch of coaches on a whole bunch of sidelines, Mr. Official, can you please ask for some help?
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JedAward-winning journalist. Frustrated pitmaster. Whiskey enthusiast. Lover of all things cheeseburger-related. Unapologetically proud Sandlapper. Archives
July 2017
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