Football: Weekly complaints of bad, game affecting calls. Refs are not full time and thus just plain get it wrong because the league is cheap.
Basketball: The sport with the biggest black eye that actually involved real corruption (Tim Donaghy). Frequent complaints of big name player favoritism wrt fouls and such.
Baseball: The sport that uses its officials the most, so there’s complaints constantly since practically the inception of the game. High demand for robot umpires behind home plate.
It’s kind of hard to decide for me. Any perspectives that may help shift my point of view?
Human umpires are demonstrably inferior to PitchF/x. In fact, their performance is judged using it, and they’re sorely lacking; they miss something like ten percent of all calls (and that includes calls no one could miss, like a pitch that hits the ground in front of home plate.) PitchF/x hardly ever makes a mistake; it’s accurate to an eighth of an inch.
They show PitchF/x results on literally every televised game. Umps miss a disgraceful number of calls.
Having said that, I don’t think baseball has the worst problem. Right now, basketball is clearly worse; the calling of personal fouls is not quite totally random but it’s pretty close to it. I am not sure how that can be fixed.
I think the NFL in particular is going to have to figure out what to do about officiating sooner rather than later. When the head of officiating tweets during a game we blew the call it’s a pretty strong indicator of an opportunity for improvement.
I don’t think I’m hearing anything like high demand for robot umpires.
I would say football, and, from what I hear, the consensus “fix” is to do what the other leagues do and have full-time professional officials. This is easier said than done, considering that football season is much shorter. Then again, it’s not as if the NFL doesn’t have the money for it. Also, there seem to be far more judgment calls involved in football than in the other sports.
I assume the “robot home plate umpire” would be just to call balls and strikes? Given that each batter has a different strike zone, this would be hard to implement accurately, and the human element would still be necessary to make a call on a checked swing, or whether or not a missed swing may have been a foul tip.
I’ve always thought that basketball is the game that can be most impacted by bad officiating. And yes, it’s because of the foul calls.
However, I’d say the NFL has the worst officiating today. Maybe it’s just fresh in the mind, but every single week (not an exaggeration) there is abundant discussion of mind blowingly bad officiating. Some of the problem is part-time officials, but I also think their age might factor in. Can guys in their 50s and 60s really be expected to run around on a field with world class athletes and be able to accurately see what’s happening?
I think that one of the other issues that the NFL has is that they have made some of their rules – offhand, I’m thinking about the rules on what constitutes a catch, and some of the rules on unnecessary roughness / illegal hits – rather complex, and requiring interpretation on the part of the officials. Add in the speed with which the actual plays occur, as well as not always having a good view of the play, and it puts the officials in an extremely challenging position.
In the case of unnecessary roughness, I’d say that, every game or two, I see a player get called for that foul on a hit that looks bad (i.e., the other player’s head snaps back, they land awkwardly, etc.), but, by the definition of the rule itself, I really don’t think it was unnecessary roughness – just a very hard (but legal) hit. But, because the hit looked bad, the officials appear to be instructed to throw the flag.
While I agree that the NFL is long overdue on making their officials full-time, I don’t know that that move would help the above issue.
Also, it’s also been noted, by the officials themselves, that many of them have other, lucrative or enjoyable careers outside of officiating. If the league were to make officiating a full-time job, they would likely lose a substantial portion of their current officiating pools, as the officials would choose to stick with their non-football jobs. Say what you want about the quality of officiating, but having to replace those officials with people who haven’t done the job in the NFL until now is highly unlikely to improve the quality of the product.
Another thread on baseball strike zone calls had me going with the high rate of bad calls. But on reconsideration with all the pitches thrown in a game, and the number of pitches per batter I have to question the impact. How many of the bad calls are decisive? How many of them favor one team over the other? Recent technology allows us to prove these were bad calls but how many of them were so close they weren’t really controversial before this technology developed. I expect the answer may still be worse than I assumed but over the course of a season a lot of them may average out across the teams and not be as significant as the home town fans may believe.
At least in baseball the rules are pretty well defined although there’s some leeway in defining the top and bottom of the strike zone. Football though has a lot of rules open to interpretation on what is incidental contact, who is going for a ball, if a ball is catchable, where to spot the ball, and what constitutes possession.
Basketball and football have the problem of when to call fouls and penalties. But so many basketball games come down to a single point and seconds to go where calling or not calling a foul makes the difference in the game. Football is not far behind, plenty of games come down to the last play of the game, although often it’s about whether there’s an interference call on an unlikely to be completed pass into the endzone.
And no mention of the Sport of Kings, Professional Wrestling? This sportsertainment is now suffering from refs who actually do follow the rules on occasion, sometimes they’re even looking at what happens. Recent matches have had refs counting out wrestlers out of the ring even after spending about 2 minutes on a 10 count. Sometimes wrestlers barely have a chance to wriggle out of a pin because the refs take only 3 seconds to count. You think those other sports have a problem? Try dealing with a situation where not following the rules is the norm.
I’ll agree. Even though football is also a difficult sport to officiate, they technically have more room to improve on their current performance since their referees are not full-time employees. I could definitely see more consistency from the NFL zebras if they had another 4 days of film/discussions/presentations during the week.
But basketball? This is basically as good as it can get. And that is not very good.
Of the three sports to me its football and its not the referees fault. There are too many “celebration” and “unsportsmanlike conduct” penalties with too heavy consequences that put the refs in too many spots where they must be forced to use subjective opinions to throw the flag.
Sports not mentioned in the top 3 include soccer, maybe the most under-regulated sport, where there needs to be two referees, one at each end of the field, swapping every 10 minutes.
Why do you suggest this? What is wrong with the officiating system currently employed in soccer? As you probably know, there are actually four officials at a soccer match which means there are already many eyes watching. The system you suggest has problems with hierarchy (who makes the final decision?) and is not needed because the current system works fine.
Also, why do you consider soccer the must under-regulated sport?
Umpires’ strike zones have always been different from the rule book’s strike zone, and the batters have always known it. I don’t think umps are the biggest issue at all. Robot umps would really make it a different game.
IMHO, the NFL’s officiating problem is mostly perception: there are now 14 different super-slo-mo camera angles on every close play, so something that no human could reliably call in real-time is now sliced and dissected to death and ‘conclusively’ wrong (and with football’s downtime, fans get to see all 14 angles replayed to death). The other major problem is that the league office’s utter incompetence and day-to-day and week-to-week inconsistency on discipline (and refusal to publicly admit that brain injuries exist) has made it almost impossible for referees to be consistent with sportsmanship and roughness foul calls. Sure, it’s ludicrous that the NFL doesn’t have full-time referees, but really, the problems aren’t because the referees aren’t practicing enough during the week.
I haven’t followed it closely, but it seems to me that baseball has dealt with things pretty well: they’ve made it clear that umpires calling balls and strikes are, and will be for the forseeable future, part of the game, while using new technology to improve umpires’ performance and using replay in a judicious way to get other calls right.
Then there’s the league where it’s universally accepted, to where the league office doesn’t even really deny it, that different players are treated differently by the officials. Where there was a corrupt official, literally changing his calls to benefit mobbed-up gamblers, and the league never noticed. The league where a referee turned his back to the ongoing game for a full minute in order to get in the coach’s face and then eject him; not only was the referee not fired, he was assigned to work that coach’s playoff game the same year!
Yeah, there’s a league with an officiating problem.
I’ve seen, first hand and live, referees having too much subjective discretion in the officiating of a match. Ive also seen, again this is someone that went to 10+ pro matches live last year, way too many no-calls because the refs back was turned and the linesman weren’t looking either. Of all the major sports, soccer games are the easiest to fix.
As much as I criticize the officiating in the NFL, I think the NFL genuinely cares about putting forth good officiating (IIRC, officiating crews are graded and, if they made gregarious mistakes, get penalized) whereas the NBA had David Stern (who said his dream NBA Finals matchup would be Lakers vs. Lakers) and other horrific, blatant issues. Stern should have been fired just for that comment alone!
It’s true that Pittsburgh received suspiciously favorable treatment by the NFL for a long time, but that aspect has gradually been cleaned up a bit in recent years. So I do think the NFL - at least today’s NFL - cares about putting out an honest product.