| | | Does it bother you just a little bit that the NFL is beginning a new season with inexperienced, unqualified and hastily hired replacement referees?
|  | | These guys will learn their true value this weekend ... the hard way. |
Me neither.
Yes, it's time for another installment of "People Who Are About To Discover How Truly Replaceable They Are," this time starring the NFL referees. They're at an impasse with the NFL owners, which is like being at an impasse with the IRS, only with more bullying techniques employed.
As part-time jobs go, working the sidelines on Sunday afternoons is somewhat more enjoyable than working the Slurpee machine on the graveyard shift. You
work a couple of hours one day a week for five months. You travel to nice cities and stay in nice hotels. You have plenty of co-workers to consult when you
need help. If you make a mistake, you can review your decision on videotape and rectify it. You never have to talk to the media.
And for all this, the NFL has offered to pay a referee $57,000 a season by his third year on the job and a 20-year veteran up to $140,000. In this
economy, the only better compensation package is being the CEO of a major corporation that just laid off 14,000 workers.
The NFL's latest offer doubles referees salaries in two years. The refs turned down the offer, asking for as much as a 400 percent increase, maintaining they should be paid commensurate with officials in other sports.
That's fine. But if they want to be paid like a baseball umpire or NBA and NHL officials, then they had better be prepared to work under the same conditions and
live the same lifestyle.
|  | | Imagine getting a chance to review -- and correct -- all the mistakes you make at your job. |
Go ahead. Spend six solid months on the road, working 162 games, squatting behind a flatulent catcher in 110-degree heat, while broadcasters scrutinize
your work pitch by pitch, never failing to mention you by name when you miss a pitch.
Go ahead. Race up and down the basketball court, trying desperately to keep up with a 20-year-old gazelle on a fastbreak so that you can be in position
to tell whether it's a charge or a blocking foul.
Go ahead. Wade into a hockey fight between two 200-pound players, one speaking Czech and the other speaking Russian, and break it up. Armed with a
whistle. While on ice skates.
Go ahead. Have Carl Everett head-butt you, Lloyd McClendon kick dirt on your shoes, Bobby Knight toss a chair at you and hear a 10-year-old fan two feet
away scream, "You suck!!!'" into your ear so loud it would drown out a talk radio host.
It's not going to happen. Because being an NFL ref is a very lucrative part-time gig for people who are generally successful, highly paid professionals in other fields. Even with the "exhausting" offseason clinics and "draining" film sessions during the season, refs wouldn't give up that sweet arrangement even if the NFL made the job full-time.
Of course, taking the NFL side in a labor dispute is a position more precarious than standing alongside Ray Lewis during a knife fight outside a bar. NFL owners are a repugnant lot who never see a union they don't want to bust. The NFL proved it thinks so little of its players, fans and product during the 1987 strike that it hired scab players and charged admission to see them play.
They're employing that tactic again and it will probably work after a lot of bad blood and a few bad calls. Like all sports labor disputes though, this can be easily resolved by next week if both sides just behave reasonably.
Owners: Don't be afraid to spread the wealth. You guys are making billions off this league. Kick your offer up a little more, get the issue resolved and look like good guys for once. Trust me. You'll have warm, fuzzy feelings about yourselves that will carry right through to your next stadium blackmail threat.
Referees: Accept the fact that it's just a part-time job. It might be more demanding than you like, but as moonlighting gigs go, it beats delivering
Domino's. So lower your demands and be happy with what you get.
Remember. You're referees. Nobody cares whether you guys are there or not.
Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com.
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