Coordinated Effort

By Tim Sloan

The NFL sharing officiating ideas with college football coordinators? Not so long ago, such an idea would never have gotten off the ground. But an influx of NFL officials into the college coordinating ranks has led to a new spirit of cooperation and sharing. And both entities are benefitting. 

Walt Anderson is an agent of change, but it might surprise you to learn how. Anderson is best known as an NFL crew chief whose conquests have included a Super Bowl and three conference championships over his 13-year career. He is the archetype of the modern football official in commitment, performance and persona. But where he has been most successful at changing the face of football has been in another area of the sport altogether: Like a growing list of his NFL confreres, he has arrived on the college scene as a coordinator of officials for a major college football conference — the Big 12. And the college people are loving it.

Scarcely a decade ago, it might have been science fiction to think that an NFL guy could even land a college job. In the extreme, big-time college football was virtually collectivized from an officiating standpoint. Each conference cut officials from its own cloth with the goal being to keep the best for their own needs and no one else’s. You could tell a Southeastern Conference crew from a Pac-10 crew by its unique mechanics. A coordinator’s primary job was to keep the crews staffed with people loyal to the conference and its teams. Improving their onfield performance was often a fringe benefit. Officials came and went, often on the say-so of coaches and athletic directors who were either enamored of a fellow’s athletic pedigree or besmirched by a critical call. If the NFL picked up an official, he was often thought of as having gone over the wall; a grudging promotion but a turning of the back on the people who made him. Against that kind of backdrop, allowing an NFL guy to then come back and supervise officials would be like turning loose a wolf in the fold.

Those times are gone now. The fat lady has sung and the orchestra has packed up its instruments. Today, steadily more conferences want an NFL official to run their show. The need for accountability has succeeded the need for loyalty. The coaches want officials they can work with rather than those they can work and the new notion is that it shouldn’t matter where a game is played: A crew will call it the same whether it’s Austin, Texas, or Austin Peay. From the teams’ perspective, college football is all about thorough preparation and they now want the same from officials. And those NFL people, with all their technology, attention to detail and management skills, have been called in to expedite that standard to the masses.

It Started in the Big 12

Tim Millis was in the vanguard of this shift from old to new. Millis was an NFL field judge from 1989 to 2001 who worked two Super Bowls and his NFL career was at its pinnacle when he became the right guy in the right place at the right time. In the mid-’90s, the old Southwest Conference (SWC) was beginning to implode. Because of large-scale rules infractions, Southern Methodist University had received the NCAA’s “death penalty” and several other schools were facing major sanctions. The image of the schools, if not the sport in general, was in crisis and Millis says part of the conference’s path back to credibility was to rebuild the officiating program, too. So, the new SWC commissioner, Steve Hatchell, asked Millis to put together a grading program fashioned after the one in the NFL.

Millis did that, enlisted some NFL officials from the Dallas area to help do the evaluations and went to work as a part-time supervisor. He feels he was brought in because he was presented to the SWC as a person of high integrity by the NFL leadership. At the time, he worked as a consultant in financial litigation after previously working with the IRS. While the job started on the premise of impartiality and Millis, by profession, seemed unimpeachable, it quickly became more.

When the conference finally dissolved, four of its schools merged with the Big Eight to become the Big 12. Millis says it had been made clear to the old conferences’ coordinators that they wouldn’t be retained through the merger and the Big 12 asked Millis to develop a plan for an observer program. He believed it would involve him getting out to all the coaches and athletic directors to survey their needs and would be a full-time job in the short term. “So they gave me a credit card and what amounted to an hourly rate to go out and do the survey,” Millis recalls. Not too much later, he was persuaded to apply for the job he had designed and soon found himself doing it.

It was a full-time job for Millis as coordinator and he kept it after he retired from the field in 2001. In 2006, he went to work for the NFL Referees Association as its executive director and it was time to look for a successor in the Big 12: Enter Walt Anderson.

Anderson says he was hired because the Big 12 wanted to make sure its officials kept up to the technical changes in the game and could withstand the added scrutiny officials were experiencing. They wanted to move officiating to a new level.

“We work in a fishbowl with no glass,” Anderson says. “You often hear that in the old days officials didn’t make nearly as many mistakes, but my contention is there were far more mistakes made; it’s just that nobody knew about them.” Anderson’s approach was to scrutinize his officials as effectively as the public was watching them so he brought the full artillery of the NFL officiating system to bear on the Big 12. He says his goal has always been to develop his officials to their full potential, not as candidates for the NFL.

He now has two full-time video assistants at his disposal to manage video from his crews’ games and uses 12 former and current NFL officials to rate his crews’ performance on a weekly basis. Those people seldom get out to games because of their Sunday obligations, but Anderson has implemented a system like the NFL’s, allowing them to do their jobs and interact with the officials electronically.

It has become a full-time job for Anderson, too, a dentist by profession who no longer practices. He and Byron Boston, an NFL crewmate and coordinator for the Southland Conference, spend all their time conducting clinics and scouting during the offseason while managing their stables inseason. A typical autumn week for Anderson begins after his NFL game on Sunday night. He and Boston fly back to the Big 12 office in Irving, Texas, where they share resources and he begins by looking at replays from his crews’ games. By 6 a.m. Monday, he’s ready to field questions and examine video from coaches. He spends the rest of the day downloading plays to his graders so that they can do their job and get back to the crew chiefs by Wednesday. He spends Tuesday on NFL business, including a conference call with his own crew. Wednesdays are spent putting together training tapes and reviewing the grades of the Big 12 staff.

By Wednesday night, Anderson is able to return to his home in Sugarland, Texas, and uses his high-tech studio/office to put together training videos, follow up on officials needing help and generally prepare for the upcoming weekend in both his jobs.

Jim Delany, commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, followed the recent trend in January when he hired retired NFL referee Bill Carollo to take over from CFO National Coordinator of College Football Officiating Dave Parry.

“When you say these (coordinators) are NFL guys, that’s where they’ve been most recently,” Delany said. “They all worked in the college game first. I don’t make a real big distinction as long as they can appreciate that … there are some things we do much better. I really like what we do in the sportsmanship area. I like what they do in regard to protecting their players. I think we feed off each other a little bit.”

Dennis Hennigan is a veteran referee in the Big East whose 10 bowl assignments have included the 2004 national championship game. The coordinator of the Big East is Terry McAulay, an NFL crew chief. Hennigan says he has not noticed a major difference in style between McAulay and his predecessor, John Soffey.

“Terry is more computer-savvy than John, and so we’ve seen more of a focus on that aspect of reviewing our work,” Hennigan said. “There’s not an awful lot of difference between the two of them. What you learn quickly in dealing with folks like Terry and other NFL guys is that they have given officiating so much thought and they have tremendous insights on how to officiate and how to handle situations.”

Conference USA referee David Epperley has what would seem an unenviable job. The man critiquing his work is Gerald Austin, who was the referee for two Super Bowls. Epperley admits it was intimidating at first, but now has come to appreciate what Austin brings to the table.

“He’s a fantastic teacher,” says Epperley, a 12-year veteran in the conference. “If you make a mistake, he tells you that you made it and he tells you how to correct it. And unless you make the same mistake the next three weeks in a row, that’s the end of it.”

Epperley said he and the other officials in the conference have benefitted from Austin’s connections. “We’ll go to a clinic and there’s Jerry Markbreit and Art McNally,” Epperley said, identifying two NFL legends. “Gerald is a joy to work for because of the knowledge he and people like that bring.”

Sharing the Wealth

The big bonus that came from the advent of technology was the ability to share its fruit with others. Today, the Big 12 and Southland conferences have a working relationship, but it’s not just because Boston and Anderson happen to be on the same crew. The Southland has often been the source of up-and-coming officials who eventually move into the Big 12. In the past, a negative in making it to the highest levels of college officiating was the fact that at least a year had to be spent working a partial schedule, getting seasoning in the league. It could be hard to back-fill the open dates and might actually stall the official’s growth. Boston and Anderson now cooperate so that Big 12 candidates from the Southland can rotate into swing spots on a Big 12 crew for part of a season to get their feet wet and be evaluated. Boston says that’s the ideal way to develop an official and not break him. Without the current technology to track these people though, it would be a very difficult plan to execute.

“I think the evaluation systems have been producing better officials,” says Boston. “We train our guys how to evaluate film and make improvement and the NFL officials are used to evaluate them because they can be extremely objective and are familiar with the mechanics we’re trying to train.

“I think most officials have embraced the level of training they’ve had and don’t see it as being too much,” he adds. “They’ve been taught how to work at the college level and they seem to eat it up.”

Boston says he and Anderson have had few weekends off, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. He estimates they see hundreds of officials every year, but, with all there is to do, “There’s never enough time for everything.”

One of Parry’s principle jobs is selecting officials for postseason bowl games, including the BCS. Since officiating mechanics have become more harmonized, it has been easier for him to select officials simply on their level of experience with less concern for the style of game and points of emphasis they might have had in their home conferences. He tends to accept the recommendations of conference coordinators as to their best crews and slots them into games based on their experience with top ten teams, large crowds, celebrity coaches and other human factors. What has impressed Parry in recent years has been that the conferences have had, “an attitude of so much more sharing.” The conferences are working together and pooling resources to improve the officiating product.

The college conferences have gained immensely from the knowledge the pro officials have brought back to their officials. Techniques, philosophies and training methods that the NFL has paid to test and develop are being used to help college officials.

“I think money — resources — are important,” Delany said. “To say that they’re not would be inaccurate. On the other hand, resources alone without great leadership, very good teaching, commitment really don’t do you much good.”

In Search of Consistency

Just as the pros have standard mechanics used by all officials, Parry is inevitably becoming involved in setting a national standard for mechanics, too.

“The mechanics that are in the CCA manuals are 95 to 98 percent how we actually do things around the country,” Parry explains. At meetings with coordinators, he says, there is much more consensus building than there used to be and an absence of “maverick” coordinators who enforce their own mechanics.

Systems like the Big 12’s have now become the norm, even when an NFL referee isn’t at the helm. Five men with NFL experience (Anderson, Austin, Carollo, McAulay and Doug Toole) currently serve in the 11 Football Championship Subdivision conferences. Still others, like Boston, are coordinators for Football Championship Subdivision conferences. Possessing NFL expertise is nice, but doesn’t it foster nepotism? Won’t having all those NFL officials — most with no other job but to manage these time-consuming roles — become a self-fulfilling prophesy: NFL guy begets NFL guy; no one else need apply?

McAulay doesn’t think so. McAulay believes the NFLers are in the job to eventually defer to the best candidates, whoever they are. Even though he recently retired at the ripe old age of 48 from his government job to devote all his time to football, he doesn’t see the NFL people as building nests for themselves.

“The concept,” explains McAulay, “is that everything I’ve learned, I’m going to start sharing. Eventually, everybody will begin approaching the management of the game the same way … I think the conferences are looking for the individual skills (to act as coordinators) that anybody can have. Just as in any business, some people are going to pick up on it and excel and probably be better than I am at it.”

Necessity is the mother of invention and the NFL officials who have come to the college ranks have planted the seeds for raising their officials to the next level — mostly in about the last five years. While the original incentive was accountability and impartiality, sophisticated referee development came in through the open door and now we’re seeing the results.

Anderson and the others say the proof in the pudding is the satisfied silence coming from the coaching community, the traditional bane of officials. If the coaches say they’re getting a better game, there can be no more powerful endorsement and the cost of the supporting technology has been accepted as well worth it.

“In the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s,” says McAulay, “officiating was an afterthought.” Now, he says, coordinators have turned it into a resource, with the goal of keeping college football a thriving enterprise.

Nobody believes the evolution will result in a single set of mechanics and philosphies. Instead, the development is being welcomed as another example of how working for the common good — pros with colleges, officials with coaches — is the best bet for preserving the integrity of the game, once ego is left at the door. NFL officials haven’t brought about this change; they have merely brokered it.

And everyone seems to be winning.

Tim Sloan, Bettendorf, Iowa, officiates high school basketball, football and volleyball.

Sidebar:

Big Men on Campus

Three active NFL officials — Terry McAulay, Walt Anderson and Byron Boston — serve as coordinators for NCAA conferences. Bill Carollo retired after the 2008 season, Gerald Austin after the 2007 season and Doug Toole after the 2006 season. Carollo is in charge of the Big Ten, Missouri Valley Football and Mid-American conference staffs (see “The News,” p. 11). The College Football Officiating, LLC, is a collaboration between the Collegiate Commissioners Association and the NCAA aimed at improving college officiating.