I have a theory that referees want all sports games that they officiate to be lopsided routs. It probably doesn’t matter to them which team wins, as long as the victory is won by a huge margin. It makes any officiating mistakes forgotten or seemingly irrelevant, since those officiating errors wouldn’t have affected the outcome. A 100-54 rout in basketball? Nobody really cares about the traveling or shooting fouls, etc.
A close, narrow game which is decided by just a few plays, however, greatly magnifies the consequences of any refereeing errors. In a 100-98 basketball game, there could really be some fingers pointed at the ref for any glaring errors. And so a narrow, hard-fought, closely contested game is a ref’s worst nightmare.
Has anyone here on SDMB been a referee or could give some insight about this?
Referee here. Currently only football, but wanting to get back into soccer and basketball when time permits again.
I don’t want to referee lopsided games. It isn’t fun or entertaining to watch one team demolish another. Additionally, the losing team often will get frustrated and start acting out inappropriately in a way that’s harder to rein in in a game where both teams have a chance.
I don’t enjoy missing calls at any point. There may not be much scrutiny for screwing up a penalty enforcement in a peewee game between last place teams, but the game matters to them and it matters to me too.
I’d much rather have a close, intense game between evenly matched teams. I’d prefer that they be good evenly matched teams, but a middle school JV game can be entertaining in its own way. In fact, the best game I refereed this year was a high school freshman game that involved a last minute score by the visitors to pull ahead, then the home team driving 65 yards and kicking a game winning field goal as time expired (with a kicker who had never hit anything other than extra points, possibly not attempted - the person I talked to was unclear). Most of my varsity games were not terribly close.
The only times I hope for a rout is when the game is already not close in cases where additional scoring will trigger a mercy rule of some sort.
It seems to me that almost every controversial call that I’ve seen has been a direct result of the jumbotron/television replay and/or the actual officials’ replay, and has either been a professional game or major college game.
Your average high school game isn’t going to have that luxury, and for the most part, what the ref says goes, and the vast, vast majority of refs aren’t going to flub something that’s so visible to people in the stands without a video replay.
I mean, you’ll get all sorts of bitching and whining in college and the pros about whether a guy’s knee was down 0.1 second before the ball crossed the goal line plane based on instant replay footage, but that shit doesn’t happen in lower levels, because the ref either signals touchdown, or he doesn’t, and that’s that.
So the vast majority of refs don’t sweat that stuff and want the games to be good contests. I’d imagine that the upper-level refs just want the plays to be cut and dried, but not necessarily the games. They don’t want these screwy ones where you have crap like this happening: