Burned twice, SEC puts wayward officials on ice

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October 22, 2009

The game is rife with bad calls on a weekly basis, and no salve following any close loss is more tried and true than harboring long, sustained grudges against the refs. But very rarely in the very long history of terrible officiating has persistent bellyaching made such strident achievements as it has in the SEC over the last three weeks, thanks to the uproar following these egregious flags in a pair of nationally televised games:

Separately, the personal foul call against Georgia’s A.J. Green following his late go-ahead touchdown against LSU (reciprocated moments later by an identical and equally bogus call against LSU’s Charles Scott following his winning touchdown) and the double-whammy pass interference/personal foul flags that helped a Florida touchdown drive to tie Arkansas last Saturday were just bad calls whose impact on the respective outcomes was probably overblown. Taken together, though, as nationally televised and hotly debated displays of incompetence by the same officiating crew in crucial moments of big games, they were actionable: Both Green (though not Scott, oddly) and Arkansas’ Malcolm Sheppard (though not teammate Ramon Broadway, victim of the phantom interference flag) were publicly absolved of their personal foul penalties by the league office within days.

And the rogue refs, not sufficiently shamed by constant harassment by angry fans, will be taking a few weeks off:

"A series of calls that have occurred during the last several weeks have not been to the standard that we expect from our officiating crews," SEC commissioner Mike Slive said Wednesday. "I believe our officiating program is the best in the country. However, there are times when these actions must be taken."

SEC associate commissioner Charles Bloom said this is the first time the league has publicly suspended a football crew like this.

The SEC says the crew will be removed from its next scheduled assignment Oct. 31 and will not be assigned to officiate as a crew until Nov. 14.

Every crew makes bad calls, and many face public ridicule and repercussions behind closed doors; even in the cases of suspensions — Marc Curles’ crew isn’t the first the league has put on ice — haven’t been announced publicly. But those crews typically don’t make two universally reviled calls in a three-week span on one of the sport’s most visible stages, prompting hyperbolic editorials and threatening their conference’s integrity by the sheer weight of public opinion.

Maybe if the league hadn’t decided to single out their mistakes from every other sketchy call a conference official made on those weekends, they could have gotten away with a private rebuke, possibly even a quiet suspension. Once it opted for public accountability, though, it had no choice to drop the hammer for all to see.

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