Expert: Vic Winnek - 11/19/2008

Question
I would like to know how game officials are chosen in cases where the teams are not from the same conference,example, Florida State vs. Florida. Are they from a third conference, split between the SEC and ACC, supplied by the home team, etc.?

Answer
JOHN,
GREAT QUESTION.

Game assignments are make usually by August and given to the conference officials at their summer clinics.  They are assigned as 7 man crews for the entire season.

Traditionally, each conference has their own procedure.  Most conferences require that the home team provide the officials.  Hence they provide their own conference officials.  Many times because there is a contract with the officials that provides they will officiate all games (conference or non-conference) in the Conference stadiums.

Before the rule change in 1990 the non conference games were worked by split crews.  The Home conference would provide 4 of the 7 officials and the visiting conference would provide 3 of the 7 crew members.  Then the NCAA did away with split crews.  Since the late 1880s the split crew concept was the norm.

There are other conference whose policy is that the visitors provide the officials. I am not aware of the ACC or SEC entering into an alliance with other conferences for officials.  Presently the Mountain West, Big 12 and WAC are the only conferences with such an alliance.

First and foremost, I want you to know Football officials are the last bastion of integrity the game has. They are unbiased arbiters of the rules who are charged with the duty of administering the game, equitably enforcing the rules and applying just penalties. They stand guardian over sportsmanship and player safety.  There only allegiance is to the game itself - not to any particular team, city, school, state, conference or region, but to the game of football.

For a number of years, the NCAA has been concerned with the nuances of how different conference officiating crews call games, such as how they interpret holding and pass interference penalties. The NCAA has hired a new national coordinator of officials and has taken steps to put together a standard philosophy that will be adopted and utilized in all conferences.

One might think the rules would be cut and dry - you look at the rule book and this is holding and that's pass interference and this is blocking below the waist. But Each conference has had a lot of philosophies coming into the process. Each conference in the past had taken a little bit different approach in that regard. They give some philosophies that help them. For example, in the Mountain West, they have always had a philosophy that if there's any doubt about whether a loose ball has come out as a fumble, it's going to be ruled a fumble.

That's sort of a philosophical approach has caused a perception about different conference's officials.   Now there is a standardize national set of philosophies.  There is a thought that through the standardization of the rule book and the consolidation of officiating crews, games will be officiated with consistency and efficiency that will eliminate the perceived favoritism.

The Mountain West Conference has established a newer concept in assigning games this season. The MWC teamed up with the Big 12 and the Western Athletic Conference last year to create a combined officiating crew from the three conferences.  Crews work four MWC games, four Big 12 games and four WAC games.

This fall, there are combined officiating crews working conference games and non-conference home games in the MWC, Big 12 and WAC. Each crew has a 12-game schedule spread among the three conferences, for a total of 24 games.

This type of assigning may could open the door for other conferences and even more assigning changes in the near future. It is the goal of some Conference Supervisors for the 2009 season that this will be the way games are assigned.

This type of assigning of officials creates one large roster of officials that work D-1 college football. It is a pool of officials that are not necessarily  Mountain West officials or WAC officials or Big 12 officials. They are simply officials who work in all three of these leagues.  There are some pros and cons to this!

Part of the impetus behind this movement was to eliminated a perceived conference biases. There has been a lot of focus on where a particular officiating crew is from and how that may affect games and there's a perception of 'homerism.'

This has all come about out of the favoritism by officiating crews occurred in that infamous Oklahoma-Oregon game in 2006, when Pac-10 referees who worked that contest at the Ducks' Autzen Stadium made questionable on-side kick and pass interference calls, which were upheld by replay officials. Those calls helped Oregon score two touchdowns in the final 1:12 and grab a 34-33 victory.
In the days that followed, the Pac-10 suspended the officiating crew, the crew's replay officials received a death threat and Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops threatened to pull his team out of a contract to play at Washington in 2008 if the Pac-10 didn't change the practice of using its own officials in non-conference games hosted by Pac-10 teams.

I WANT TO EMPHATICALLY DENOUNCE THIS PERCEPTION!  THE PAC-10 OFFICIAL ARE SOME OF THE FINEST, HONEST, FAIREST OFFICIALS IN THE GAME.  IN FACT YOU CAN REST ASSURED THAT NO OFFICIAL WORKING COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAY FAVORITES OR IS A HOMER OFFICIAL!!!!

College Football Staff Writer, David Fox of Rivals.com wrote an excellent article last year about the selection of Bowl officials.  He wrote:

"Players, coaches and athletic directors aren't the only ones sweating out bowl bids in the first week of December.

Officials are an anxious bunch a few days later when bowl assignments are made. A top-notch bowl assignment for an official is akin to a Rose Bowl bid to a Big Ten team or a Sugar Bowl bid to an SEC team.

It's fitting, then, that selecting officials for bowls isn't all that different than picking teams for bowls: A ranking system is taken into account; so is strength of schedule, and tradition (or, rather, experience) also is a factor.

The assignment of officials for bowls is not taken lightly. When the NCAA and each conference get together at the end of the season to pick officials for college football's biggest stage, it's the culmination of a year's worth of evaluations, or more.

"You're not going to pick anybody you don't think is top-notch, or you're going to look like a fool," said Jon Bible, a longtime Big 12 official who has a postseason assignment. "We know that it's merit-driven, so it's an honor."

The pecking order for each bowl's officials arrives on the desks of David Parry, the national coordinator of Division I officials, and three other supervisors of officials. At the end of the regular season, each conference submits its rankings of all of its official to Parry and the three other supervisors. The rankings include evaluations from conference coaches and administrators, as well as how often the officials have appeared on a big stage.

In the Big Ten, for example, the list of potential bowl officials presented to the NCAA includes evaluations on each official from each game from the home coach, the road coach, a technical advisor and Parry, who also is the Big Ten's coordinator of officials.

Each conference also presents the number of nationally televised games each official has worked, as well as the average attendance in his games and number of ranked teams he has officiated.

Not every official in a league is selected. Of 55 Big Ten officials, 28 will work bowl games.

"We use the term 'all-star crews,' " Parry said. "They are all-star crews that have earned the right to do a postseason bowl game based upon the performance during the year. … It's safe to say the guys that do work have filtered through a rather tight screen to work their way to the top."

Rather than selecting entire crews, conferences present their first-stringers at each position. For example, the Big 12 crew working the BCS Championship Game will include officials from several crews in the conference.

This is how last year's Bowl season (2007) was officiated. Bowl Officials were selected by the NCAA to officiate the following games as a crew:
BCS Championship (Ohio State vs. LSU) Big 12 Crew
Fiesta (Oklahoma vs. West Virginia) SEC Crew
Orange (Virginia Tech vs. Kansas) Big Ten Crew
Rose (USC vs. Illinois) Big East Crew
Sugar (Georgia vs. Hawaii) Pac-10 Crew
Alamo (Penn State vs. Texas A&M) C-USA Crew
Armed Forces (Cal vs. Air Force) SEC Crew
Capital One (Florida vs. Michigan) ACC Crew
Champs Sports (Boston College vs. Michigan State) Big 12 Crew
Chick-fil-A (Auburn vs. Clemson) Pac-10 Crew
Cotton (Arkansas vs. Missouri) ACC Crew
Emerald (Oregon State vs. Maryland) WAC Crew
Gator (Texas Tech vs. Virginia) Big Ten Crew
GMAC (Bowling Green vs. Tulsa)  ACC Crew
Hawaii (Boise State vs. East Carolina)  Mountain West Crew
Holiday (Texas vs. Arizona State)  SEC Crew
Humanitarian (Fresno State vs. Georgia Tech) Big East Crew
Independence (Colorado vs. Alabama) WAC Crew
Insight (Indiana vs. Oklahoma State) Pac-10 Crew
International (Rutgers vs. Ball State)  C-USA Crew
Las Vegas (UCLA vs. BYU) C-USA Crew
Liberty (Mississippi State vs. UCF)  Sun Belt Crew
Meineke Car Care (Wake Forest vs. Connecticut)  SEC Crew
Motor City (Central Michigan vs. Purdue)  ACC Crew
Music City (Kentucky vs. Florida State)  Big East Crew
New Mexico (New Mexico vs. Nevada)  Big 12
New Orleans (Florida Atlantic vs. Memphis)  Big Ten
Papajohns.com (Cincinnati vs. Southern Miss)  Big 12 Crew
Poinsettia (Navy vs. Utah)  MAC Crew
Sun (Oregon vs. South Florida)  MAC Crew
Texas (TCU vs. Houston) Big Ten Crew
Outback (Tennessee vs. Wisconsin)  Mountain West Crew

"It inevitably will happen that very few have been together during the year," said Rogers Redding, the SEC's coordinator of officials. "We don't evaluate them as crews; we evaluate them as individuals. We look at mechanics. We look at rules knowledge. We look at conditioning and physical appearance and attitude."
The top-ranked individuals at each "position" will work together as an officiating team for a conference's top bowl game. In the case of the "big six" leagues, a conference's top-ranked referee, head linesman, umpire, back judge, field judge, side judge and line judge will likely work the league's BCS assignment.

The second-ranked crew will work the league's second-best assignment, usually on New Year's Day, and so on.

Adjustments can be made to ensure the certain officials work together. Given how closely a referee and umpire have to work, for instance, conferences might assign a top-ranked referee and second-ranked umpire from the same crew to the same bowl game.

Neutrality also is important. Officials cannot work a bowl that features a team from their league.

"Let's say Missouri ends up in the national championship game and we're working it from the Big 12," Bible said. "If something controversial happens, that's the first thing people are going to jump on. We either called it for Missouri because we're Missouri's conference officials or we called something against Missouri to prove we're not homers by bending over backwards to not give Missouri a break.

"We don't want that. The conference doesn't want that. I don't want that as an official."

While each conference selects individual officials for bowls, the NCAA doles out the assignments. Each conference represented in a bowl must have at least one officiating crew working in the postseason. The number of crews each conference gets is somewhat proportional to how many teams the league sent to the bowls in the previous season.

This season, for instance, the Sun Belt will have one crew (in the Liberty Bowl), and the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC each will have four crews in the postseason.

While not written into the rules that the "big six" conferences will provide the officials for the BCS games, officials from those leagues tend to have the big-game experience required to work college football's elite bowls.

Recognition from their peers isn't the only perk to being a bowl official. There's also a payout.

Bowl officials receive $1,800 for BCS games and $1,500 for the other 27 games. Not included in that is bowl gift (specifically, a watch), $100 per diem for three days and transportation to the bowl site and the stadium. The per-game pay alone is about double what major-college official earn per game.

Not a bad perk for a job well done."

I hope this helps you understand the selection process.  It may be more information than you sought but I hope it is helpful

Vic Winnek
NCAA Football Official