NFL Open Thread: working the refs edition

I was fascinated by Kalyn Kahler’s look into how closely NFL teams scout the refs:

I couldn’t stop thinking about this play. I watched George elbow his way through the offensive line over and over again. He’s running so fast until he thuds against a wall of giant humans who will not let him through. This was a situation where an official impacted the game without even making a decision that anyone could argue with. Was the play-call to blame? Or the Cowboys players? And how much did George’s actions matter here? I couldn’t let it go, so the next week, I called an NFL game management coach to help me understand what went so wrong. 

This coach was shocked by the play-call. He explained that their team wouldn’t have run that play without more time on the clock, because however long they think they have, everything goes faster and smoother in practice, where equipment staffers who know what the play is are standing in for the officials. I expected that. But what he said next surprised me. 

“The crazy thing is that Ramon George is the fittest umpire in the NFL,” this coach said. “He’s in the best shape of any of them. So if he couldn’t keep up with this play, who could have?”

Wait a second, I interrupted. How do you know he’s the fittest? 

“I know who trains each official,” the coach told me. “I know where they went to school, I know what kind of shape they are in. I know everything about them.” 

This coach watches every play of every game to see how the officials move and react. He tracks how long crews take between plays to know how to time out end-of-game scenarios, and they give a scouting report to players on each official’s athletic capabilities. If the official is older, they’ll instruct players to hand them the ball to make it quicker and easier for them to spot the ball. And in the case of this Dallas play, the coach said they could tell that the Cowboys staff didn’t give George a heads-up on what they’d be doing on the play, or George would have been following more closely behind it. 

I knew teams scouted their opponents with obsessive levels of detail, but I didn’t know they scouted the officiating crews just as closely. 

“The Dallas play is exactly why teams scout officials,” this coach told me. “This is exactly why.”

And isn’t it ironic:

When Dean Blandino thinks back to the first coach he noticed pioneering the area of officiating analytics, one name comes to mind: Mike McCarthy. 

“In Green Bay, they really started diving into the officials and putting together reports,” he says. “My first exposure to a team that put together a comprehensive review.”

McCarthy, as you probably know, was also the head coach presiding over the Cowboys’ 14-second clock-spot-snap snafu. Dallas also led the league last season with 127 penalties. Which is perhaps a good reminder that scouting the officials is just like any other of the hundreds of tactics in a team’s toolbox, with which they try to gain the slightest of edges: It’s only as useful as what you do with it.