You realize full-time officials would be even more under the NFL's thumb, right?

[Galeb]

No, we're saying (among other things) that the refs spending more time they are now (which is a lot of time, during the the season) isn't going to make them much, if any, better.

Yes, practice & study helps, but only to a point. There are saturation effects to everything.

It's called diminished returns, but when one truly engages themselves in becoming better, diminishing returns can be greatly mitigated. Tom Brady is the ultimate example. There are enough intelligent, passionate people that love football that would love to be refs that there would be no problem finding enough dedicated individuals to excel and make use of all the time.

Simply watching film and reading and discussing rules is not how to make refs much better. With full time refs, you could really broaden the training to build up the skills and mental tools required to be a good ref.

Please stop trying to promote the idea that full time dedication to a craft doesn't yield massive results in complex professions. There are too many counter examples for intelligent people to believe such garbage. Seriously guys, that's a truly ****ed up perspective and both of you are way to smart to buy into it.

 

[neuronet]

It's called diminished returns, but when one truly engages themselves in becoming better, diminishing returns can be greatly mitigated. Tom Brady is the ultimate example.

This is especially true where complex pattern recognition in real time is involved, especially for NFL where there are more rules than even BB can keep track of.

Can you imagine if they actually trained for 10+ hours a week with virtual reality headsets, like many quarterbacks do? This could help reinforce simple visual pattern recognition skills for corner cases of the rule book (e.g., batting the ball out of the end zone) and would pay off big time.

It is crazy that they have this multi billion dollar industry, they spend all this time talking about the paramount importance of the integrity of the game, spend millions of dollars trying to show Brady had someone let fractions of air out of a ball, but don't want to spend money on refs. In 50 years, if the NFL still exists, we will look back at it and be like "What the hell were they thinking back then?"

 

[Galeb]

This is especially true where complex pattern recognition in real time is involved. I.e., refs. Can you imagine if they actually trained for 10 hours a week with virtual reality headsets, like many quarterbacks do? Even simple things like that, to help reinforce simple visual pattern recognition skills for corner cases of the rule book (e.g., batting the ball out of the end zone) would pay off big time.

It is crazy that they have this multi billion dollar industry, but don't want to spend money on refs. Or cameras. In 50 years, if the NFL still exists, we will look back at it and be like "What the hell were they thinking back then?"

The NFL already pays part time refs ~100K to start, so from a salary perspective, full time refs wouldn't be any more expensive.

IMO, the most important skill refs need to truly be good is to minimize ego and bias. It's a rare and difficult skill that takes significant time, and dedication to learn.

 

[pencilneckgeek]

Is this a serious post? A lawyer by trade would blow the whistle? Or maybe the ref would go get a lawyer??
Tom Brady and his 9 figure net worth and excellent representation was nearly putty in the hands of the NFL. The machine steamrolled him. But Joe Ref is going to hire a lawyer, blow the whistle, the corruption will be exposed, and all the bad guys get their just rewards along with the system returning to A-Ok? That is incredibly naive to believe that.

Joe Ref cheated on his wife 5 years ago, was accused of domestic abuse in divorce filings, was seeing a psychiatrist 7 years ago, once called someone a media unacceptable name, had substance abuse issues 25 years ago. Joe ref should get used to these kinds of things -- and his day job coworkers and clients should get used to hearing them to. The machine is coming for Joe ref and it will be a tidal wave. But hey, the media will keep it honest and real for him right? Their track record for whistle blowing is, ahem, quite good. At least Joe Ref will surely get a big mega phone provided by media to proclaim "the NFL was repeatedly doing points of empahsis specific to the Patriots. They wanted to the Patriots to have flags thrown on them". Response: "so Joe Ref, you are claiming the team the league determined cheated twice was given unfair scrutiny under the rules? We looked at the various referee calls against the Patriots. We found the calls were correct 70% of the time, borderline 15% of the time, and wrong 15% of the time. Is it uncommon for calls to be wrong at that rate? And the other reports of your spousal abuse and mental problems, how do you respond to those".

And that is nothing to the kind of dogs they can call out. You do not go against that kind of power unless you have one extreme reason to do so. So what person in their right mind would go get a lawyer to fight this good fight, lose their ref job, expose their day job to great uncertainty, have their and family reputation smeared, their lives turned upside down, all to fight the good fight of the league unfairly scrutinizing the Patriots? Maybe Joe Ref should fly a unicorn to the lawyer's office since it is a fantasy story....

My point is that there are officials who have 6-figure salaries from their day jobs, wherein their continued employment is subject to ethics clauses in their contracts, and I don't think they would be entirely comfortable with a letter from their fun-time job employer telling them to act outright dishonestly. I'm not suggesting that there would be line of officials waiting to blow the whistle on the NFL, I'm simply saying that if it is routine behavior for the officials to fix the games, then one of the part-time officials, who do it for love of the game, would likely blow the whistle. They would certainly get attacked by the NFL PR and legal machine, if that were to happen, but the damage to the NFL would be done and it would be in the billions of dollars. Therefore, I do not believe that there are clear directives provided to officials to fix games and assume that those who say that the fix is in are either speaking in hyperbole or are irrational homers (not that there's anything wrong with that). There could conceivably be individual officials paid-off on the side to make key calls go a certain way, but I don't think the NFL cares that much about who wins and loses to risk their billion-dollar gravy train, whatever personal vendetta Roger may have against the Pats.