Remember this debacle?
Or how about this one more recently?
The most talked about players in the sporting world have become the people enforcing the rules. It seems like every other day they are blowing games and potentially changing a game’s outcome. There was a time when referees would let the players play and you would never notice them running along the sidelines. You might get mad when they call a foul or penalty against your team, but it was a fair call that would NOT affect the outcome of the game. Those days appear to be gone.
While it has become an epidemic over the last few years, it was never more noticeable than when the NFL referees went on strike. Fans started noticing how important the refs actually are. The very people who are in charge of keeping the game fair are the ones who are making it unfair with these blown calls.
While having referees keeps the game human, but what happens when they don’t know the rules? Now we have to keep the game human AND dumb? No. The players and the owners should not stand for this. There should be no reason that an official on the professional level should forget rules at any point. There should be no reason for fans to leave a game talking more about the officials than their favorite player.
While games need officials and there is no way around it, maybe it is time that they take mandatory classes on the rules every year. Maybe it is time that referees, umpires, and officials all put their egos aside and try to hold themselves to a higher standard for the better of the game. It is time that the officials fade back into oblivion and people forget they are even there. This is not to say that referees are to blame for every team’s loss because that is clearly not the case. It is just out of control that they are becoming the highlight of games as of late.
