Retired college-football referee Gerald Wright worked as a replacement official during the NFL lockout earlier this season. During his seven-week tenure, the 64-year-old and his fellow officials were blasted by fans and commentators as subpar substitutes. He recalls his two months under the harsh glare of the sports’ biggest stage with The Post’s Michael Gartland.
The announcers, the fans — they had a field day with us for seven weeks, but I enjoyed myself. When the NFL called me, I had retired from the game. My experience had been in the Big 12. And I was retired from my insurance business too, so there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff to do.
The whole thing took on a life of its own — the media took a lot of this stuff and blew it out of proportion.
Every game the coaches get in your face, but that’s happened since I was doing Pee Wee ball. Coaches get excited. If he’s yelling at me and he’s upset, I’ll listen. They know what they’re talking about, and sometimes they’re right.
From a distance, you can see somebody get in somebody’s face, and it looks like they’re going to come to blows. That’s not the case at all. They’re coaching. They’re coaching the players, and they’re trying to coach the officials.
In the Houston-Carolina preseason game, there was a call made on a crack-back block. The Houston Texans coach, Gary Kubiak, called me over and said, “I’m trying to help you guys. That call was not right.” And he was right. The call was incorrectly called. He was trying to help.
He didn’t say, “You’re a replacement and you’re dumb.” He was very diplomatic. I appreciate the way the coach handled it.
In the Titans-Detroit game, the ball got spotted in the wrong place. It was a replay situation. There had been a pass. And the question was: Was it caught or was it incomplete? I got buzzed by the replay booth. There was a personal foul at the same time. The foul was correctly called. But there was confusion as to where the ball was snapped from. The replay officials gave us the place to mark the ball.
I don’t know if they did it on purpose, but it was the wrong spot. We ended up spotting the ball on the wrong side of the 50-yard line.
That was the replay guys’ error. I mean, we were the officials on the field — but that was their call. And those replay officials weren’t replcements; they were regular NFL officials.
[The 12-yard mistake set up a game-winning Titans field goal in overtime.]
In the Denver game, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin also tried to make his case to me — although the confrontation may have looked nastier than it was.
He threw his flag to challenge the ruling on a play right at the end of the first half — it was whether the player was down or had fumbled. The flag he threw came very late and nobody saw it.
I sure didn’t see it, so I said let me check with the side guys and the replay guys. Mechanically, that’s a tough call to make if you’re a regular official or a replacement official. He got the review.
There was another unusual call in the Denver-Pittsburgh game. We got to the two-minute warning and Denver scored right at two minutes. The Denver coach wanted to take the two-minute warning before they go for the conversion so they can decide whether to try for two points.
I never read anything that says you can’t have it, so I gave it. It’s not in the rule book. It’s a rule for the TV scheduling.
That didn’t stop the national TV announcers — like Cris Collinsworth. They were all over me. They had a field day.
The media — they were harder on us than the players and coaches.
The replacement officials didn’t have any more incorrect calls than there normally are. If it happens during a regular game, it’s “who cares.” When we were officiating, then it was a different story.
If you screw it up, you screw it up. The announcers are the ones who get paid to talk about it.
The real story here, though, is a lot of the replacement officials — probably all of them that aren’t retired — won’t get their old jobs back. Division I conferences are supervised by NFL officials — replacement refs will be blackballed. I’m retired, so it doesn’t hurt me.
You had to get better and you had to challenge yourself. Each week, more and more pressure was building. But you studied the rules harder. You watched more film. It was an opportunity for all of us to get better as officials.
It was hard, but doing an NFL game is like doing a Broadway play. You have the producers, the directors, and you have the actors and actresses, which are kind of like the players. It’s a big production.
You miss stuff all the time in football. But as a crew, we did a really respectable job. In my view, we really didn’t have a bad experience.