He has no idea what caused the limp; when you're 54 and running with boys, time inevitably kicks you in the rear and the Achilles. His old legs will loosen once the game starts. Tonight's venue is familiar for Mike Wilmoth. He taught driver's ed here, he coached baseball 18 miles up the road and, in the very few moments of solitude, he has stared out at these southern Kansas fields and dreamed of a bigger life.
When White saw the email with tonight's assignments, she looked at it twice. A week and a half ago, Mike Wilmoth was in Nashville. They saw him on TV. While the NFL referee lockout of will forever be panned as a debacle, complete with castoffs from the Lingerie League, in-game brawls and a botched call in the final second of a "Monday Night Football" game between Seattle and Green Bay last week, Wilmoth will remember the replacement era differently.
He'd worked his whole life for that moment, dropped 25 pounds just to get the chance to be a replacement, and there he was, standing on the field with Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson. Now that the impasse between the league and the real officials is over, Wilmoth is back in Kansas, working an eight-man football game between South Haven and Oxford.
A junior varsity eight-man football game. There will be about 50 people in the stands for the first quarter, plus a few carloads of parents who'll honk after every touchdown. There will be no drama, just a couple of boys who walk up to him and ask if he was the guy who reffed in the NFL.
It is Monday, a week removed from that "Monday Night Football" game that effectively led to the ending of the three-month NFL referee lockout. Life is returning to normal for the replacement refs. They can go back to being anonymous. For refs like Wilmoth, whose crew went through three weeks of the NFL's regular season without any enormous gaffes viewed by a live audience of 16 million, they will quietly fade into Friday nights.
He can never, really, be anonymous again. Not in southern Kansas. He gets in his truck and heads home, but will not watch one minute of the "Monday Night Football" game between the Bears and the Cowboys.
He knows the conversation inevitably will lead back to the replacements. And he can't bear to hear the best three months of his life being called three of the uglier months in the recent history of the National Football League. But I mean, heck, it was a football game. No one died. The poor kids in Afghanistan and places like that, they've got serious jobs.
B ecause they were the biggest story of the first three weeks of the NFL regular season, because they came from all walks of life and exited the stage in such a dramatic, that-couldn't-have-just-happened way, let's give these replacement referees a proper sendoff. Who were they? Why did they do it? And where will they go now? If their names are mentioned, it usually means they've done something wrong. But America loves a seemingly hopeless underdog yarn, so their stories need to be told.
The NFL declined to comment for this story, and many of the referees, even after receiving their walking papers, still wanted to lay low. They live their jobs by rulebooks, and at least several of them said that the league politely asked them to hold off talking to the national media for a week, presumably when the world had moved on to the next story about Tim Tebow. Perhaps the replacement curiosity, in some ways, can be likened to Tebow: It is human nature to be fixated on someone who seems destined to fail but continues to try.
When it comes to finding the people who make up the very highest level of football officiating, the real refs, the NFL leaves nothing to chance.
The average regular referee is scouted by the league for as many as five years. He goes through an extensive FBI background check, detailed interviews and memorizes more than 1, rules.
The objective is perfection and invisibility. Jim Tunney, an NFL ref for 31 years, said competence was never about memorizing a rule book. In a league that earned the nickname Not For Long because of the short shelf life of most players, a referee spends much of his life waiting to get older and better. Tunney said it takes most rookie refs at least three to five years to fully understand the spirit of the rulebook.
But the NFL, in the spring of , didn't have time. In it, he listed seven guidelines in bullet points. They wanted officials to be "coachable" and of "impeccable character. Each applicant was required to run a half mile. Those who couldn't were eliminated. Physical appearance is important. I'm sure guys were eliminated because of conditioning. Recently retired refs were sought out.
So were lower-division college officials, along with pro and semi-pro refs whose, according to the email, "window of opportunity for advancement has pretty much closed but who still have the ability to work higher levels but just got overlooked. In late June and early July, about applicants showed up in Atlanta and Dallas for clinics. They were quizzed on NFL rules and put through a series of physical tests that one replacement official said mirrored a combine.
There, after more than a half-hour of stretching, the candidates ran yard dashes and performed various agility drills, including backpedaling and sidestepping as quickly and efficiently as possible. But he was big," said one replacement ref who asked that his name not be used. Any guy with a pot belly didn't make the cut. Another criticism of the replacement referees is their potential to be biased on the field.
How can referees be expected to be objective when they are officiating games where their idol is starting at quarterback? In a world where you control the success of your favorite NFL football team, it is not impossible to imagine that the thought of helping your team to victory would not cross your mind. Finally, the lack of professional referees in the NFL calls each and every controversial call into question.
Tonight, the bizarre finish in the Seattle Seahawks win over the Green Bay Packers was only made more confusing by the fact that the replacement referees clearly did not know what the correct ruling was.
Again, on a national stage, the replacement refs showed why they were replacements in the first place. It was a bit of a shock to see guys that couldn't officiate in our league were officiating in the NFL…The entire crew was released due to several poorly called games which included missed calls, poor judgment and poor presentation for broadcast.
They were hurting our overall broadcast caliber. And if it's opening up our players for potential injury, those things raise red flags here. When either of those two things are compromised, it's time to start thinking about parting ways.
What does it say about the caliber of job the official is doing when he was fired from the LFL and could possibly work NFL games? Ochoa has only worked preseason games so far in , but he is one sickness or injury away from being called up to the big leagues and holding power over multi-million dollar companies.
While no one knew who side judge Brian Stropolo was before a few weeks ago, he has become one of the key faces in this whole replacement official fiasco. The Associated Press is reporting via Sports Illustrated that Stropolo was removed from potentially working a New Orleans Saints game in Week 2 because it was discovered that the replacement official was a die-hard Saints fan.
These referees are replacements for the normal team of NFL refs. Those regular refs are currently locked in a tense negotiating process over their contracts. You might have heard about the calls that the refs flubbed. Like the no-call on roughing the kicker in the Chargers-Titans game. Or the offensive pass interference flag on Jacoby Jones of the Baltimore Ravens. Or, in the same game, the flag against Ryan Clark for a legal hit on Ike Taylor.
Or the touchdown stolen from the Rams in their game against the Redskins. Or the subsequent penalty against Stephen Jackson who spiked the ball in disgust. This was bad. This was Skywalker-discovering-his-father-was-a-magical-mass-murderer bad. He went on CBS Boston this week and said :. Although have done some good things, I think it points out the need to get the regular guys back on the field. FOX Sports was a little bit more understanding :.
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