Seeing that all the refs and officials have other side occupations seems like they aren’t fully mentally focused on the job. Maybe they do still pull it off anyway, but why not just hire and pay them all full-time and have them focus their work lives around that one job only, officiating?
Well, I didn’t know that they weren’t full-time (but then, I don’t follow football all that closely), so in my attempt to confirm that this was accurate I found the Wikipedia article.
Is that enough of an answer to your question?
You’re too late. The NFL already has some full-time refs. About a fourth of their refs are full-time, IIRC.
Many of the part-time refs work roughly full-time hours (40 hours per week) during football season. They go do other jobs after the Super Bowl and come back during the summer before the season starts up again.
To be fair, this is a relatively recent change. They hired a bunch of their part-time refs on as full-time last year, then hired a few more this year.
What do the full-time officials do during the off season? Two thirds of the year is an awful lot of time off.
It’s more like 1/2 the year, but the point is still there. Indeed even during the 1/2 the year there are games to referee, it hardly seems like there are 40 hours of work per week for all of the officials.