(10-08-2014 12:41 AM)ark30inf Wrote: We do talk about these refs...and there are issues. But it sure seems like in the old SBC days it was a yellow blizzard all the time....but that may have just been us.
A lot of it was us. :(
I sort of go against the grain of most fans in that I don't complain a great deal about officiating. When you start looking at how well average Sun Belt or MAC or even FCS level officials do making calls without the benefit of slow motion having to make an instant judgment watching the action while staying field aware enough to not get plowed over and running along side the action, the officials do a far better job than most will ever give them credit for.
I felt like considering how few people who could be good officials actually pursue it because of the money and time demands that the Belt had built a decent cadre. Yeah we got some fame from the Alamo Bowl mess because the pagers the bowl provided didn't work but no one seemed to notice in January of 2012 that an ACC crew denied the opportunity to get a replay on an NIU fake field goal that the replay showed came up short of a first down because they said the play wasn't reviewable even though the line to gain is absolutely a reviewable play.
A friend with ties to the SEC had told me two years ago that the SEC supervisor of officials maintained a "watch list" of officials that they considered to be potential future SEC officials and said that even though the Sun Belt had 14 fewer guys on assignment list than CUSA that the Sun Belt had nearly twice as many officials on the watch list.
In the long run I think Steve Shaw taking over assignment is a good thing. It makes working the Sun Belt a more obvious path to getting SEC assignments so ambitious officials will want to work Sun Belt games.
In the short-run it has disrupted established crews.
There is a bit of magic or voodoo in assembling good officiating crews.
The first step to officiating is mechanics. Are you where you are supposed to be as the play unfolds, looking at the right place for the right things?
Anyone who is well trained can watch film and judge mechanics.
But putting a crew together is where the voodoo comes in.
You have to have good communication and you want guys who are compatible and that takes some time to figure out.
If the back judge and side judge aren't compatible you can have a receiver on one side of the field getting mugged and not drawing a PI or defensive holding call while the corner covering the other side is getting flagged for incidental contact. If the head linesman and line judge aren't on the same page how a tight end lines up might be deemed legal when he is on the right side of the formation and illegal when he is on the left side if one is calling it a bit tighter than the other.
It took the league about eight years to get consistent on blowing the whistle when forward progress was stopped. There was a lot of unneeded contact against players who had lost forward progress and teams credited with fumbles on plays that should have been blown dead.
I feel like we've had a set back since the change though not as bad as it was up until around 2009. In the various games I've seen in person and the even more I've watched on Sundays on ESPN3 I've seen a number of plays where a player is in grasp, has lost forward progress and no whistle is blown until another defender comes in and hits them. In a few cases (one was AState-ULM) the ball carrier had been picked up and did not have his feet in contact with the turf and the whistle came after a second player struck the ball carrier. The Sun Belt used to be plagued in non-conference play by late hit calls and I felt it was a direct result of league officials being late blowing the play dead. So I'm not happy that we've regressed a bit there.
I still think in the long-term it works out but right now we are behind where we've been the past few years in officiating.
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