Jon Bible, a prominent figure in both college baseball and football officiating, and a longtime contributor to Referee Magazine, died July 12 after a battle with bile duct cancer, which was diagnosed in February. He was 75.
Bible’s extensive career in officiating included significant contributions across multiple levels.
From 1970 to 1973, he worked as a minor league umpire. In 1974, he began umpiring college baseball. In his long career, he umpired 25 Division I regionals and seven College World Series (1979, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1988 and 1995). He was appointed as the first national coordinator for the NCAA Division I Baseball Umpire program, a role he held from 1990 to 1996. In this capacity, he was instrumental in formalizing umpire evaluation and development programs. He was inducted into the National College Baseball Hall of Fame in 2019.
On the football field, Bible served as a referee in the Southwest Conference from 1987 to 1996. He spent three seasons in the NFL as a side judge before returning to intercollegiate sports in the Big 12 Conference, where he worked three championship games. In the 2010s, he became a replay official in the SEC. He received several bowl assignments as a replay official, the most recent being the Alamo bowl in December 2023.
Bible was a longstanding and prolific writer for Referee Magazine, first starting in the early 1980s and appearing regularly in the football and baseball sections in the following decades.
Outside of officiating, Bible was an attorney and a professor of finance and economics at Texas State University, where he taught business law.
He is survived by his wife, Carolyn.
