What are the most difficult referee or umpire positions?
I’ll throw in Home Plate umpire. To maintain a consistent strike zone for 9 innings in the heat while constantly being scrutinized by both teams must be pretty high on the list.
I’ll also add the guys that determine offsides in soccer. That’s even difficult after watching in slo-mo in HD.
NFL coin toss.
Just ask Phil Luckett, Thanksgiving Day, 1998.
I am amazed at slow motion replays in baseball and in football where in an overwhelming number of instances the referees get it right. I don’t know of any statistics, but it would appear to me that the compliance rate exceeds 95%.
The quicker the sport, the more difficult it is to get consistent calls. Try following hockey players around on the ice at 20 mph, engaging in full body contact and a piece of vulcanized rubber being fired at 100 mph. Hockey, is a very difficult sport to referee with the same kind of consistency as other major sports. I don’t think it’s uncommon to see two or three blown calls per game. This is entirely due to the nature of the sport and not an indictment of the refs themselves.
Pro wrestling. No matter how hard they try, the refs always seem to miss the bad guys cheating.
It has to be American football. There’s a rule violation that goes unnoticed in most plays. Players adjust their personal strategy based on whether a referee is looking at them.
The reason it’s so difficult to enforce the rules in football is because SO MANY people are all active at the same time, and involved in the play. Certain types of physical contact are allowed, but other types that are only subtly different are not. It’s impossible to watch every individual on every play, and the players know it.
Note that Incognito says he stopped playing dirty, because he “matured.” Not because he was caught and punished for it. For every penalty ever called on him, he “got away” with thirty other violations.
Calvinball
I think cricket umpire must come into it. Some of the rules (laws!) are labyrinthine and there are lots to consider with judgement calls being required on many game-changing incidents.
In recent years the development of hawkeye and other electronic aids has meant that the umpire has had a means by which their judgement calls can be challenged and overturned. What is surprising is the degree to which they get the big decisions right on the vast majority of occasions. That has rather enhanced the umpires reputations I think.
So I think it is hard from the POV of scrutiny and the potential for looking foolish rather than technical difficulty but hard nonetheless.
Also Rugby presents many of the same challenges as American football with the added complication of constant motion, plus scrums, line-outs, rucks, mauls etc. each with its own set of rules and nuances of interpretation.
As it happen, rugby refs miss loads of infringements all the time but it does’t cause too much of a stir. So maybe to referee a game of rugby perfectly may be very difficult. But as such perfection is not actually expected perhaps that makes their job a little easier. I’m not sure. Others more acquainted with rugby reffing can chime in.
I ref games of rugby. It’s bloody hard. You’re best off ignoring some infringements in the interests of actually having a game. In this, I suspect that American Football crews may do similar, so as they are not throwing a flag on every play (though it would not be the done thing to admit it - in point of fact they’d probably be pilloried for saying that they ignored stuff).
Where rugby refs have it harder than US crews is that there’s only the ref and the two assistants. At least US Football crews have more eyes on the action (at my level, there aren’t even assistants, it’s just up to me and me alone - suffice it to say, positioning is important and I tell the players that I can’t stand in every place at once, so some things will be missed - indeed, a good working relationship with the players is vital, so that they can raise issues that you might have missed and they give understanding that you can’t be everywhere).
Since they seem to get about 10% of strike calls wrong it may not be that hard.
I used to referee rugby union and still am qualified to umpire cricket. The Laws of Cricket are really pretty simple and it takes little time to learn the basics. The odd arcane circumstance can be tricky but you can go your whole career without striking one. If you do though it will be covered somewhere. I think most cricket fans would be pleasantly surprised by how well they do understand the Laws if they read them. Of course whether decisions are right or wrong in fact rather than law (caught behinds, LBWs, stumpings etc) is potluck. You call it as you see it and sometimes you are wrong. So the DRS is a boon.
I don’t watch much rugby union now. It was easy to referee in my day as there was little of the dreadfully boring recycling of possession that constitutes modern rugby (except the All Blacks who still do attractive stuff). There weren’t complicated rules about the conduct of the ruck, it was feet only and release the ball immediately. Mostly the rucks consisted of all forwards on their feet like a scrum and players were penalized for laying in the ruck. What is most irritating is that the rule changes seem to have progressively made the game more boring and the rules are such that every penalty given seems to be an arbitrary choice. Egregious infractions are missed while the referee spots meaningless technicalities. Even people who like rugby whine endlessly about the officiating. Mind you this is all international stuff. Club rugby still looks more like the rugby of my day and would be more pleasant to referee.
I’m still going to say “calling Offside in football (soccer)” – the linesman has to pay attention to the passer and the receiver, who may be 50 meters apart, and call the play based on the receiver’s position, relative to the defense (across the whole field) at the moment the passer passes the ball
These calls get blown on a regular basis, and yet I am still impressed, nay, flabbergasted by how often they actually manage to get it right, somehow.
You don’t know how right this is. I ref amateur stuff up here in London and the best games of rugby I have seen over the last 2 years have all been between amateur sides (because they don’t have the skill level to bend the laws as the pros do, so just get on with trying to score rather than “gain advantages”). The constant messing around with the law book is one thing that makes rugby reffing difficult - and you’re also right that the changes are not necessarily helping the game as a spectacle. I’d possibly advocate a total re-write and separate laws for the amateur (non-broken) version of the game and the pro.
Race walking has to be up there. No, I have never seen a competition, but I know the basic idea – judging the form has to be pretty damned hard.
Also, doubles table tennis, which I have seen performed on TV a few years ago. Very fast, very small playing area.
Curling has to be one of the easier ones – they still play that, right?
On behalf of my good friend Tim White, forner WWE referee, I have to say not only are you right, but in fact it is easily the most physically bruising referee job there is. He can no longer work in the ring as a result of the numerous injuries he received from the job. No doubt his inability to see large men jumping through the ropes, and his inability to count to three were contributing factors 
The NBA must be a very difficult league to officiate. Almost all calls are subjective and there seems to be an unspoken understanding between all parties involved that the way games are officiated will vary throughout the course of a game and the course of a season. And apparently playoff officiating is a completely different animal. Oh and “star” players shall receive special treatment from officials. All these little nuances of NBA officiating seem to be at least accepted if not completely agreed upon by players, coaches, fans and broadcasters.
Basketball is my assumption (although maybe hockey, for similar reasons). The action is near-constant and awfully fast, there are very modest distinctions between legal and illegal actions, and it’s often the case that there are three, four, or more guys’ arms all tangled in one place when a shot goes up.
–Cliffy
Any thoughts on line judges in tennis? I’d go with pretty not-that challenging. Maybe seeing a footfault for some kind of compact serve or a Roddick special. The challenging part would be penalties for excessive, too-lengthy breaks, decisions about available daylight, commiseration with fan/family members/coaches and controlling the proches of a given competitor.
Hockey’s a given – I can hardly follow hockey on TV with my poor eyesight. Getting into icing has to be a nightmare. Ditto wrestling – Greco-Roman. I had a comp student who wrote an essay (he was a full-ride student athlete in wrestling) who wrote a paper on wrestling and not only did I learn a bunch, I had him explain some of the rules (IIRC like a leg is up over for a certain amount of time) over coffee while I gave him notes on his essay. Probably the first time he had where somebody didn’t give him a pass, but made him work hard and judged him on his improvement. He wasn’t the best writer out there,and not exactly a brainiac, but he worked hard, and he did just fine. I liked that kid – he worked hard, took my notes and kept true to his subject. He even slogged through, like the rest of my class, the book I chose for that semester, Clear and Simple As the Truth – probably a bit advanced, which was my mistake but I think better than some other standard readers. He may have been biased to be nice since he was a poor kid on athletic scholarship and I gave him an extra desk copy I had gratis. Good kid, and he was one of the handful of people who worked the hardest at mastering the material. The other was Ramo’n, who blossomed in his essay on Der Strakolonie and Foucault’s prison book. Goddamned, you can really tell people who want to be there. I miss teaching. Even getting the green pen out and really working one on one with kids who wanted to learn.
I’m going with football, followed by basketball.
In football, the refs must be in a position to view the play, but also in a position where they will not be trampled by 1000 lbs of football player. They have to run up and down the field keeping their eyes on what they are *supposed *to be looking at, as opposed to where the ‘action’ may be.
Eh. Not a football guy, although I enjoy watching or listening occasionally.
Please tell me you do know that a 1000lb rear end doesn’t really exist? Granted I’m still pissed cause World Series isn’t even begun, but I like football well enough that I give you the benefit of the doubt.
Geez – 1000 lbs??? No, I’m calling shenanigans or whatever your angle is, brohim.
That would be a good extreme sport – fucking orca the whale “running” at 1000 lbs. I’d go pay-per-view chipping in with some retarded friends to watch that.
Serious, that could be good. Have a punter carry a wheelbarrow and plow into people. I love it!
It might be helpful to differential between three separate skills a referee/umpire needs:
The ability to determine a specific rule infraction (e.g. offsides in soccer, ball/strike in baseball, etc.),
The ability to anticipate and counteract game circumstances which would make (1) more difficult (i.e. “see” as much as possible),
The ability to manage rule disputes and proper enforcement.
(1) is certainly governed in large measure by the rules of the sport. If the question is strictly about (1)–which sport has the most real-time rule decisions requiring a high degree of skill to determine–then it has to be baseball, where nearly every pitch is a judgment call. But I don’t think you can neglect (2); for a number of real-time sports–football, rugby, soccer–IMO this is a much bigger factor in determining officiating difficulty. I think (3) is the least likely to be affected by the game itself and is more a matter of personal discipline. The comparitive complexity of the rule set and perhaps the nature of the players may be a factor (I’d guess a contact sport would have players more likely to intimidate an official, especially if you have to cite some obscure section of the rulebook), but I don’t think it’s a major one.
When one guy tackles another to the ground, you have BOTH their weights.
If you have ever seen a football game, you would have noticed that sometimes multiple players will tackle a member of the opposing team. When they are all in a group, much like a herd of buffalo, their force is kinda added together. At the bottom of a pile-up, which happens multiple times per game, the weight can easily exceed 1000 lbs, as a 240 lb linebacker in the NFL is now considered ‘undersized’ and ‘small’. The herd will not really stop