An official should never go into a game with expectations of who is going to win. Admittedly, I often do. Most of my colleagues do the same. It has no bearing on my calls or no-calls or have any influence on how I perform. I couldn't care less who actually does wins the game. Completely irrelevant to me. As I have mentioned before, I frequently don't even pay attention to which teams are playing... there is a team in a white jersey and team in a not-white jersey.
This week (week 9) I assumed the undefeated team would beat the .500 team. I worked these two teams last season during the California State Championship game. During this game, both teams were undefeated; however, clearly one team was better than the other --- 58-6 better.
So, going into this game, what was I too think?
When the score was 6-0 at halftime... and the anticipated victors were losing... I was frankly perplexed.
The coach with the goose-egg, of course, blamed the officials for his team losing. And if I am being honest he had plenty to gripe about. Several poorly officiated calls/no-calls by two of the weaker officials on the crew made the entire crew look terrible. These mistakes were accentuated because they all occurred during some form of change of possession when everyone and their mother was watching.
My opinion on this scenario is the coach should never let the game be decided by me (the officials). His team touches the ball 60-70 times a game. I do not influence each and every play, but mistakes may occur on non-routine plays. And when players fumble the ball, weird shit happens. His team fumbles several times. When the ball gets punted, weird shit happens. His team punted a lot. Someone once said, "Three things can happen when you pass the ball and two of them are bad." His team passed a lot. Most of the questionable calls occurred during fumbles, punts and passes. In this league, at this point its maturity, you are going experience officiating mistakes when weird shit happens.
I am not making excuses. This coach got screwed on several plays. It pisses me off when mistakes are made and now I become part of the game. I want people to forget, or better yet, not even notice I was even there. The game deserves good officiating and we earn our money making difficult judgment calls when things start falling apart. The level of officiating does need to improve which I will discuss in another post.
Ultimately, the team who I expected to win did prevail 14-17. There were some interesting plays I'll mention in the next post.
