How to interpret the furor over the NFL’s replacement referees

It’s become fashionable to trash the NFL’s replacement referees.

In case you are not up to speed on this, what’s happened is the NFL regular referees are on strike. They are part of a labor union.

They want a cushier, more gold-plated retirement plan to go along with their $160,000 yearly salary they are getting for working 16 games.

So it’s already darn good pay for part-time work.  But they want more, of course.  Hey, I’ll happily referee an NFL game every week for free.

What a blast that would be.  It would save me $300 or so on buying a ticket.  And I’d have the best seat in the house.

The politically correct commentators on ESPN, etc, all take the side of the unionized referees and trash the replacement referees.

Let’s face it, the replacement referees have been getting some calls wrong. But the regular referees also get plenty of calls wrong.

I’m a huge NFL fan, and the objective truth is this. The replacement referees have probably been getting more calls wrong than the regular referees get wrong, but not that much more.

It would be interesting to see an objective study on this.

90 percent of the time, their blown calls are corrected by the replay.

And I’m not having any less fun watching the games.

If anything, I would say the games have been more fun to watch this year because not as many flags are being thrown. The replacement referees have been allowing some more bumping of the receivers than the regular refs would allow, so the games look more like games you would see in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the game between New England and Baltimore last night, nearly a full quarter elapsed before a single penalty flag was thrown. I like that.

And there’s a good reason for this. Most of the replacement referees come from college football. So they are used to officiating in accordance with college football rules. They sometimes forget NFL rules.

The replacement refs will continue to improve. They aren’t hurting the integrity of the game because both teams on the field play with the same refs.

I even like the fact that one of the replacement referees is a woman (assuming she got there on merit and not some kind of affirmative action).

SIDEBAR: Aren’t we supposed to want the referees to look more like the rest of America?

The media demands female Supreme Court Justices, female cabinet members, female corporate CEOs, and female members of the Augusta National club where they play the Masters.

So the media should be thrilled with a female NFL referee.  Right?

But they’re not thrilled . . . because the media’s loyalty to Big Labor trumps their desire to shatter the glass ceiling.

END SIDEBAR.

I’m certainly not seeing any less fan interest because of these replacement refs.

If I were a unionized referee, I’d be worried. Looks like they are about to get PATCO’ed.

That’s shorthand for what Reagan did to the air-traffic controller union in the early 1980s.

If you don’t remember that, Google it.

Reagan simply replaced the striking air traffic controllers with a new group of air traffic controllers who were eager to work.

Many pundits predicted a surge of plane crashes.

That didn’t happen, of course. What did happen is the busting of a powerful labor union. Reagan’s crushing of PATCO in that battle helped accelerate a downward trend for labor union membership that continues through today.

So if you are a reader of this blog and not so keen on Big Labor, root for the replacement refs.