While Mike Tomlin said the Pittsburgh Steelers can’t and shouldn’t use poor officiating as an excuse for their loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday, there’s no doubt it was a problem in the game. On his All Things Covered podcast, Steelers CB Patrick Peterson took a more measured approach, saying the NFL needs to hire their officials full-time so they can be more focused on the games throughout the week.
“What the league has to do is they have to hire these guys full time so they can continue to look at the film, continue to look at calls, continue to look at motions, to have a study guide on certain players. ‘Cause these guys got regular nine-to-fives,” Peterson said. “Their nine-to-five job, they’re focused on their nine-to-five. So they’re not solely focusing on how to referee a game or if they got a call bad, how they can become better. Maybe they do, but I feel like if they give these guys a full-time job, to make the game better, and not have these continuing conversations on Tuesdays like, ‘oh I got it wrong.’ These games are too precious in this moment of the season, where we’re playing an AFC opponent, where this can come down to if we get in the playoffs or not, or seeding,” Peterson said via the All Things Covered YouTube channel.
NFL referees, while not full-time, are paid pretty well for their work. While there’s obviously a ton of travel involved, Sporting News reports that the average NFL referee made $201,000 in 2019, and that figure is likely higher today. Actual totals aren’t disclosed, and a lot of officials do work other jobs during the week before heading to call games on Sundays.
While the NFL has taken steps to make referees full-time, as Kevin Seifert laid out in 2017 on ESPN.com, it’s not the case for most referees. Shawn Eck, a rookie official who was the referee for the Pittsburgh-Jacksonville game, is a tax manager as his day job, per Yahoo Sports.
How much more the NFL even wants to pay officials to make them full-time is an issue when it comes to making a move like that, as they’re already being paid a decent chunk of change. The NFL can obviously afford more, but the question then becomes how much is it really going to improve the quality of officiating on the field. It’s not as if the current crop of officials do not take their job seriously. They’re still going to have bad days and bad games, whether or not they’re full-time. That’s the nature of a sport’s rules being enforced by humans. Nobody is going to be perfect at making every single call.
It could certainly improve the quality of the product, but I’m not sure it will do so enough to make it worth it for the NFL or the officials at hand. It’s a good idea in theory, but in practice, the human element still has to come into play. I think it’s a step that if both sides agreed would make a significant improvement to the quality of the game and improve officiating across the board. If the NFL felt that it would increase the quality of the game, they would already have implemented it.
A lot of the calls, namely the offsides call on OG Isaac Seumalo on a field goal, were bad on Sunday and they didn’t go in Pittsburgh’s favor. But the Steelers also weren’t good enough, and bad calls are a part of football.
The stakes are high for the players on the field and they’re also high off the field, with gambling such a huge part of the fabric of the NFL after online gambling’s broad legalization, and the quality has to improve. But I just don’t know if making referees full-time is going to be the move that brings any sort of seismic change.
You can watch the full All Things Covered podcast below.
