As fans of professional football, we often take to task the NFL and its enforcement policies, questioning how or why some postgame league level decisions are made. It turns out that there is an exhausting system for reviewing each weekend's games, looking for infractions.
A sports nut article written Dan Kois for slate.com recently described what goes on at the NFL's Officiating Command Central the first couple of days each week.
Kois reports that everybody in the office who wants to, from the mail room guy to the officiating staff, is assigned a game. They watch them over and over, looking for infractions that may or may not have been caught by the game officials.
The story says that this level of scrutiny has been going on for decades both to make sure that the referees are doing a good job and that players are not getting away with things they shouldn't.
The OCC itself was created after 9/11 to consolidate the league's security operations and the weekly game scrutiny fit there well.
Kois says they watch both TV tape and coaches' films. The viewers are looking for any kind of player misbehavior, plays that can be classified as "controversial" or "unusual," or instant replay challenges that get messed up. Plays that are especially unusual are shown on a big projection screen and studied by a group.
Once they are satisfied that all the player misdeeds have been detected, the list goes to the league's Director of Football Operations, Gene Washington. He decides whether any fines should be levied against players.
The article explains that subtle, hard-to-spot-in-real-time violations, like leg whips and chop blocks, can take four or five viewings to show up.
At each game site, as well, the NFL sends a monitor to grade the on-field officials. He charts each call and non-call then gives feedback to the officiating team and reports grades to the staff in New York, which assigns the officiating team a grade.
Question: When fans boo an official's call they don't agree with, they are expected to accept that the official on the field, being closer to the play, could see it better. So, how is the guy who grades the officials going to see better than them from the stands, or more likely clear up in the pressbox?
Each NFL stadium provides a uniform inspector who checks to make sure that each player meets the uniform code.
Football is not the only pro sports league to review its participants. For the NBA, the league's Entertainment Headquarters in Seacaucus, NJ is the site for game study.
There the inspectors look for what are called "plays of interest." If anything "interesting" enough is spotted, it is referred to the basketball operations department.
They didn't have any trouble spotting hoodlums going from the court into the stands at The Palace a couple of weeks ago. Catching the subtleties of who did what to whom when took more work.
Kois said that the National Hockey League also monitors games from the league office in Toronto. Of course, they don't have much to do right now.
Major League Baseball, in addition to not having a drug policy worth the paper it's printed on, also doesn't have an observer system. MLB just uses TV footage and other media commentary to police itself.
Who would want to watch a baseball game over and over again anyway?