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By JOHN ROMANO
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 31, 2001
The lockout of NFL officials was, it appears, inevitable. This is what happens when you engage in a battle of wits and neither side is armed.
Who do you support in a fight when nobody deserves to win? Go for the money-grubbing geeks or the fancy pants cheapskates?
That just about sizes up this dissing match. The NFL, a billion-dollar conglomerate, is taking a harsh stand for what amounts to a few hundred thousand dollars a team. In other words, risking the integrity of the season for the price of a backup cornerback.
Lest you think the NFL is completely at fault, consider the union's stance. Officials began negotiations by seeking a 400 percent raise for, essentially, part-time jobs. Incidentally, there is no truth to reports that the union is being advised by the St. Petersburg City Council.
The result is that we have an impasse and the final week of the preseason will be officiated by replacement referees.
With no developmental system in place, the NFL is forced to reach into the Arena League, college football and heaven-knows-where-else for replacements. The league quickly has put together seminars to teach these would-be NFL officials the differences in leagues. ("That's what I'm saying, Bobby, the field is 100 yards long and there are no walls.")
The NFL has so much faith in its own expert officials that the league uses instant replay to monitor their work. Now it's going to dip a little further into the referee gene pool?
In the interest of saving the season before it's too late, we have come up with our own test to determine whether any readers have the aptitude to be a replacement official. And, please, no sharing of answers.
Match each NFL term with the correct definition below:
1. Pass interference
2. Fair catch
3. Illegal shift
4. Sudden death
5. Double foul
6. Post-possession foul
7. Two-minute warning
8. Crackback
9. Unnecessary roughness
10. False start
A. Amount of time you are able to engage in an intelligent conversation with Dick Vermeil before he begins to cry.
B. Consequences of blowing a call in the end zone near Raiders fans.
C. When a first-timer mistakenly sits in Terrell Davis' VIP seat at the Gold Club.
D. Angie Harmon.
E. Occurs when innocent fans are forced to listen to Dennis Miller and watch the Jaguars in a Monday night game.
F. Cade McNown's career.
G. Using immigrants, sans green cards, to work the sideline chains.
H. What Emmitt Smith has to look forward to in 2001.
I. Being detained on cocaine charges just months after coming off probation for a similar offense. Commonly referred to at the Officiating Academy as the Michael Irvin Rule.
J. Distasteful rear view whenever Packers nose tackle Gilbert Brown bends over in training camp shorts.
(Answers: 1-C, 2-D, 3-G, 4-B; 5-E, 6-I; 7-A; 8-J; 9-H; 10-F)
By now, you realize just how much information an NFL official must digest during the course of a game.
Which brings us to the root of the problem:
NFL officials are part-time employees who spend the majority of their weeks selling real estate, teaching school or reading X-rays.
If the league is so intent on going first class, isn't it about time that officials become full-time employees? Perhaps use them in clinics in the offseason? Maybe make sure they have more than a passing knowledge of the rule book so we can be spared endless conferences on the field?
Instead, the league is willing to play blind man's bluff with the officials. It will use replacements this weekend, when games are utterly meaningless, and hope there are no major gaffes.
Then it returns to the negotiating table next week and tells the union that it is quite happy to continue with the amateurs. It may even get around to pointing out that the 1987 season continued with scab players. From that standpoint, using replacement referees is not all that intimidating.
The only question is whether it takes a week or two into the regular season before the union crumbles. And whether, during that week or two, some playoff-bound team loses a game because of a blown call and finds itself without home-field advantage in January.
Until then, the replacements are on the job.
Hip, hip, charade.