Why are there replacement referees

Life is returning to normal for the replacement refs. They can go back to being anonymous. For refs like Wilmoth, whose crew went through three weeks of the NFL's regular season without any enormous gaffes viewed by a live audience of 16 million, they will quietly fade into Friday nights. He can never, really, be anonymous again. Not in southern Kansas. He gets in his truck and heads home, but will not watch one minute of the "Monday Night Football" game between the Bears and the Cowboys.

He knows the conversation inevitably will lead back to the replacements. And he can't bear to hear the best three months of his life being called three of the uglier months in the recent history of the National Football League.

But I mean, heck, it was a football game. No one died. The poor kids in Afghanistan and places like that, they've got serious jobs. B ecause they were the biggest story of the first three weeks of the NFL regular season, because they came from all walks of life and exited the stage in such a dramatic, that-couldn't-have-just-happened way, let's give these replacement referees a proper sendoff.

Who were they? Why did they do it? And where will they go now? If their names are mentioned, it usually means they've done something wrong. But America loves a seemingly hopeless underdog yarn, so their stories need to be told. The NFL declined to comment for this story, and many of the referees, even after receiving their walking papers, still wanted to lay low.

They live their jobs by rulebooks, and at least several of them said that the league politely asked them to hold off talking to the national media for a week, presumably when the world had moved on to the next story about Tim Tebow. Perhaps the replacement curiosity, in some ways, can be likened to Tebow: It is human nature to be fixated on someone who seems destined to fail but continues to try. When it comes to finding the people who make up the very highest level of football officiating, the real refs, the NFL leaves nothing to chance.

The average regular referee is scouted by the league for as many as five years. He goes through an extensive FBI background check, detailed interviews and memorizes more than 1, rules. The objective is perfection and invisibility. Jim Tunney, an NFL ref for 31 years, said competence was never about memorizing a rule book. In a league that earned the nickname Not For Long because of the short shelf life of most players, a referee spends much of his life waiting to get older and better. Tunney said it takes most rookie refs at least three to five years to fully understand the spirit of the rulebook.

But the NFL, in the spring of , didn't have time. In it, he listed seven guidelines in bullet points. They wanted officials to be "coachable" and of "impeccable character.

Each applicant was required to run a half mile. Those who couldn't were eliminated. Physical appearance is important. I'm sure guys were eliminated because of conditioning. Recently retired refs were sought out.

So were lower-division college officials, along with pro and semi-pro refs whose, according to the email, "window of opportunity for advancement has pretty much closed but who still have the ability to work higher levels but just got overlooked.

In late June and early July, about applicants showed up in Atlanta and Dallas for clinics. They were quizzed on NFL rules and put through a series of physical tests that one replacement official said mirrored a combine.

There, after more than a half-hour of stretching, the candidates ran yard dashes and performed various agility drills, including backpedaling and sidestepping as quickly and efficiently as possible.

But he was big," said one replacement ref who asked that his name not be used. Any guy with a pot belly didn't make the cut. Frump, who had officiated for 40 years, including the past 14 at the Division I level in the Missouri Valley Conference, did make it.

That group was invited to a three-day clinic in Dallas where the NFL's officiating supervisors began educating the replacements on the intricacies of the NFL rulebook. Probably 80 to 90 percent of the rules are common but you've got page after page after page of exceptions.

I'm well-versed in that stuff and it was still a challenge. In Dallas, the group was broken down into crews so they could begin to get to know one another. There was video review, lengthy question-and-answer sessions and endless tests and examinations.

It would continue every week until the regular officials would return. Frump says the voluminous preparation was a far more thorough than in There was a greater commitment to the training, but at the same time there had to be because they were training many people from a lower level who needed that additional time. O f course they weren't ready. They couldn't be. They were high school refs and retired officials making up crews who'd never worked together before.

Tunney compares it to a pilot versed in flying single-engine planes getting behind the controls of a jet.

They're just not qualified. Week 1, many observers thought, went about as well as the NFL could've hoped. The replacements fulfilled the goal of every referee: They weren't noticed. The players, it seemed, were feeling the new referees out. But then a Week 2 game between Philadelphia and Baltimore spun out of control. Skirmishes turned into barroom brawls, officials marinated on calls and the game stretched to 3 hours, 38 minutes.

In Week 4 with the regular refs, the games were back to a more normal run of 3 hours, 8 minutes. This didn't include Monday night's Chicago-Dallas game. When you're a kid and a substitute teacher comes in and introduces themselves, there's always going to be a couple of kids who are going to act up and test the limits.

I think that's what happened for a couple of weeks. Because he'd been a replacement before, Frump was prepared for this. From the very beginning, he wanted his crew to make its presence felt and let the players know that they were in charge.

But not every crew appeared in control. The league had to do something. It reached out to the owners, coaches and GMs of all 32 teams and warned them that behavior exhibited in Week 2 would not be acceptable. But of the eight replacement refs willing to talk for this story, none of them said they felt disrespected by the players or coaches.

There was a photo splashed all over the national wires of Tennessee quarterback Matt Hasselbeck yelling at Mike Wilmoth, who had his back turned. Wilmoth has heard from many people who saw the photo. The replacement referees are in over their heads. Most of these referees have never worked on a national stage. In many cases, they have been affected by being on the same field as players and coaches of the highest caliber.

Even in the preseason one of the refs saw Joe Flacco and he was amazed. I was thinking 'Wow, what if this was [Tom] Brady? I understand they respect us as players and they respect certain men that they've seen or watched.

But when it's all said and done, you have to step on that field and you cannot be bullied. In Week 2, Broncos head coach John Fox and defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio verbally abused the replacement referees whose inability to control the game led to a fiasco of a first quarter on a nationally televised game.

They were hurting our overall broadcast caliber. And if it's opening up our players for potential injury, those things raise red flags here. When either of those two things are compromised, it's time to start thinking about parting ways.

What does it say about the caliber of job the official is doing when he was fired from the LFL and could possibly work NFL games? Ochoa has only worked preseason games so far in , but he is one sickness or injury away from being called up to the big leagues and holding power over multi-million dollar companies. While no one knew who side judge Brian Stropolo was before a few weeks ago, he has become one of the key faces in this whole replacement official fiasco.

The Associated Press is reporting via Sports Illustrated that Stropolo was removed from potentially working a New Orleans Saints game in Week 2 because it was discovered that the replacement official was a die-hard Saints fan. One of the biggest parts of this equation, that fans sometimes forget, is the impact that gambling has on the NFL as a business.

While the whole situation is so silly that it is laughable, the grim realization that these officials are not unbiased hits hard; you have replacement officials with possible agendas controlling these games. At least the NFL was prepared for this referee lockout and properly trained the replacement officials in a timely manner. He's a very polite, good Christian gentleman, a good father to his son, Daniel, who was at my academy as well.