Officiating mistakes are part of the game. The NFL should be doing everything in its power to minimize them.
On Sunday in Cleveland, field judge Jeff Shears made an inexplicable blunder. After Browns receiver Amari Cooper caught a pass along the sideline and broke free for what should have been a touchdown, Shears blew the play dead, ruling that Cooper went out of bounds.
Here’s the video. Shears was standing right there.
It shows up in the official game summary like this: “2-9-CLV 35 (2:38) (Shotgun) D.Watson pass deep left to A.Cooper pushed ob at TEN 40 for 25 yards (K.Fulton).” But Cooper wasn’t pushed out of bounds. The only person who believed that was the one person who was STANDING RIGHT THERE.
Frankly, there’s not much that can be done to prevent mistakes like this. It’s critical that the league nevertheless try, especially in an age of legalized gambling.
Said Commissioner Roger Goodell in 2012, before gambling became legalized and the league realized how much money could be made from it: “If gambling is permitted freely on sporting events, normal incidents of the game such as bad snaps, dropped passes, turnovers, penalties, and play calling inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing.”
The simplest potential fix would be to embrace full-time officials. If/when they have only one job and can focused on it all the time, there can and will be increased meetings and communications with no distractions of any kind. And when a mistake inevitably is made, no one can say, “Well, that wouldn’t happen if the officials were full-time employees.”
Appearance means everything in situations like this. Goodell said it himself more than a decade ago, when explaining that “normal incidents of the game” will increase speculation.
The NFL wasn’t required to embrace gambling and its lucrative revenue streams. Now that it has, the NFL needs to come up with meaningful ways to reduce mistakes and, in turn, to quiet speculation that something fishy is happening.
Even if nothing fishy is happening, mistakes like the one that happened today in Cleveland will make people think there is.