Minor League Football - Week 5.

This week's game was an odd one.

First, I worked the same home team I worked last week. Not the end of the world, but not ideal. Then, I'm working as the Field Judge. I've never worked Field Judge before. For those who do not know, the FJ is one of the deep officials who primarily cover passes. Your key is the outside receiver. Or two outside receivers. Or three outside... basically, you have the outside receivers.

You start 20 yards off the ball and back peddle the entire game. On plays outside the 15 or so, you typically have the goalline. Inside the 15, we tend to go to the endline. Not something an Umpire typically does.

The visiting team shows up with a handful of players. "The others are on their way, but stuck in traffic." Whatever. We're starting the game at 7:00. This team was so short players, the coach suited-up. The 51 year old coach.

So, the Visitors start the game with 18 players. Home team has something like 50 players.

The games goes like this. Home gets the ball. Scores. Visitors get the ball and go four and out. Home gets the ball and scores. Visitors get a first down and then four and out. They apparently have no punter.

Now the odd part begins. At 9:39 in the 2nd quarter there is a big hit on the far sideline. Turns out, the ball carrier for the Visitors broke his leg. He's right on the sideline so we cannot continue play.

After 10 minutes or so the meat wagon shows up. I guess his is busted pretty bad because it took forever.

The visiting coach finally asks if we can have a running clock. Of course. But he doesn't mean during the game, he mean right now. Run the clock off now. Ok, if that's what you want. When we ask the home team coach he say "sure, but hell we haven't even thrown a pass tonight". They were up 28-0 already.

So, while the 9:39 is burning off, the home coach asks if this delay can be halftime and we start the third quarter as soon as the ambulance takes off. Sure thing coach.

During the burning of the 9:39 one of the visiting players says, "I'm getting too old for this game". When we asked how old he was he said, "forty-eight". What! He wasn't the only player on that team with gray hair.

We ran the entire 2nd half with a running clock. I think the entire game we threw maybe five flags. All false start or offside. A pretty boring game over all. We were done in 90 minutes. I can't even get a Freshman game done that quickly.

Oh well, seventy bucks is seventy bucks.

Minor League Football - If I only had a Brain - Part 1A

If you read the last post you'll recall this was not my best game. Most spectators would never know the difference, but as someone once said, the camera never lies. And apparently someone (no, a different someone) was filming last week's game. I was offered a DVD of the game -- I accepted. Let me review the film and see how bad things really were. If I can cut out a piece of the film, I'll add it the web so you can see what I see.