I follow CrownRefs and Paul Diasparra on Facebook. Although their posts focus primarily on basketball officiating, I’ve found that many of the principles they discuss apply equally well to football. Over the…
Referee Magazine’s “The 23 Most Powerful Lessons of Officiating” includes a short quote that delivers an important message: “Bad body language will silence good words” That sentence perfectly captures a reality every…
I had an interesting experience at breakfast recently that made me think about football officiating. I normally sit in the same place at the table for meals. I don’t think about it.…
One of the easiest ways to become confused about forward progress and the momentum exception is to think they are closely related. In reality, they are almost opposites. The key is recognizing…
One of the most difficult parts of officiating is deciding what to do when a play is not clearly a foul. Some actions are easy. We see an obvious hold, an illegal…
In our previous Ready for Play article, we used an airline trip from New York to Denver to explain Rule 2-33-1, the loose-ball play. We imagined a transportation company hired to escort…
One of the first concepts we learn in penalty enforcement is that there are only two types of plays: a loose-ball play and a running play. That sounds simple enough until we…
Almost everyone has a story about someone who abused the authority that came with a position. Perhaps it was a security guard on a power trip, a government employee determined to make…
