NFL Head of Officiating Says Refs Must Avoid 'Train Wreck' Calls

There's nothing easier than ripping the refs. Across all sports, bashing the officials is a time-honored tradition. "Kill the umpire!" is a line in Casey at the Bat, for goodness' sake. Nobody should pretend that Ed Hochuli is the first guy to blow a call and get torched for it.

But this story on NFL officiating makes you wonder. From Mike Triplett of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, after a conversation with NFL head of officiating Mike Pereira:

"Did I think it was bad last year? No. But what I think what we had was some train wrecks," Pereira said, referring to high-profile errors such as referee Ed Hochuli's infamous missed fumble call at Denver in Week 2 and the discounted Troy Polamalu touchdown return at Pittsburgh in Week 11.

"Train wrecks hurt you. They hurt the overall perception of the league's officiating. ... What happened in Week 2, it was hard going through that publicly."

Pereira said the officials' success rate did decrease slightly in 2008 - from an accuracy of 98.3 percent in 2007 to 98.1 percent in 2008. As good as those percentages might sound, it still averages out to around three missed calls per game.

Three missed calls per game? Does that sound like a lot to anybody else?

Breaking it down, there are seven officials per NFL game. These guys work one game a week. Assuming that 98.1 percent success rate really does equal three missed calls per game, that means there are only 101 calls per game to make. Compare that to a baseball home-plate umpire who watches 300 or more pitches per game. Or a basketball referee who runs the floor with world-class athletes half his age and has only two other guys to help him? Or a hockey ref, who has to do it all on ice skates, and honestly, three misses per game doesn't sound that acceptable.

So, to Mike Pereira's point about "train wrecks," I might say they're bound to happen every now and then if you assume three missed calls per game. I'd even go so far as to say that the "train wrecks" serve some useful purpose, if they highlight the flaws in a flawed system.

NFL refs aren't full-time employees. They earn about $27,000 per year on average, compared to about $150,000 per year for baseball umps, who are full-time employees who fly first class, stay in fabulous hotels and get four weeks of paid vacation during the season. The way baseball treats its officials, it has the right to demand perfection. It has the right to order reviews at least as thorough as those apparently conducted by Pereira and his crew.

But as long as the NFL is using part-timers who fly in for the games and then fly back home to their real jobs once the work week starts, it's going to be hard to ask their officials to be perfect. With all the attention that's paid to these games, all the money they generate, all the angst, emotion and cold, hard cash that gets invested in them every week by their fans, isn't it fair to expect that 14 eyeballs can combine to get all the calls right?

It would be, if they were full-timers.

And knowing what we know about the NFL, it's hard to see how that would bankrupt anybody.