After Monday Night Game ..... Real Refs Will Be Back Next Week .... Guaranteed!

[jbeecham]

Hogwash. Go ahead and swallow what the NFL is selling.

http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/nfl-referee-officiating-impasse-threatens-integrity-072412

That totals up to about $89K per year. The NFL is including pension liabilities, health insurance coverage, and all other benefits under weekly salary. Is that how you talk about your salary?

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/8429885/nfl-reaches-agreement-officials-end-lockout

The agreement hinged on working out pension and retirement benefits for the officials, who are part-time employees of the league. The tentative pact calls for their salaries to increase from an average of $149,000 a year in 2011 to $173,000 in 2013, rising to $205,000 by 2019.

Maybe they don't all make 6 figures.... but the average last year was $149,000 according to this article.

 

[kerouac9]

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/8429885/nfl-reaches-agreement-officials-end-lockout



Maybe they don't all make 6 figures.... but the average last year was $149,000 according to this article.

If you look at the sidebar from the actual NFL statement you'll see the real deal:

Apart from their benefit package, the game officials' compensation will increase from an average of $149,000 per year in 2011 to $173,000 in 2013, rising to $205,000 by 2019.

Remember that the NFL and ESPN are partners. I don't really think that ESPN being nefarious; I just don't think they're business writers and don't have a lot of credulity or sophistication when it comes to these things. Andrew Brandt especially was victim to a false-equivalency that you see from a lot of political reporters.

"Compensation" can mean a whole lot of things, but in this case it likely includes travel expenses, per diem, health insurance, etc., etc. If you take out 16 $1000+ first-class airline tickets out of that "compensation" you get to real money pretty quickly.

 

[Duckjake]

But this is the point. Lots of Americans like football. Football trumps ideology. And the NFL referee lockout is turning into a gigantic advertisement for organized labor. Conservatives have spent decades successfully associating labor unions with laziness and shoddy work. Here we have, broadcast into tens of millions of living rooms all autumn long, a high-profile example of an almost perfectly chosen case for unions. Management consists of multimillionaires commanding a wildly profitable and often publicly subsidized business, trying to squeeze its workforce in a way that’s utterly debilitating to the product.

I didn't know that there was an NFL referees Union run apprenticeship program or advanced training for NFL referees. In fact I think the NFL provides training not the union.

If not, then what in the world do the unions have to do with the quality of the product? The referees just got together to collectively bargain.

 

[carrrnuttt]

They work 1, maybe 2 days a week.. I am sure they have material to review going into the games, but lets get real, Work 2/5 of the calendar year, only a couple days a week.

Yes they probably deserve a slight raise, but these guys should not be millionaires.

I used to work around/with people that have Masters degrees and even PhDs. I "only" have an Associates Degree to my name (for now). I make at least double than most of the people around me. The difference? I am a computer/web programmer with a lot of experience and a good track record. The "other people" are teachers or curriculum developers.

The current market and environment dictates that my skillset is currently worth more. Is it fair? I'll leave it up to your prejudices to say either way, but it is the way it is.

The bottomline is, you really can't judge the value of a profession by how much physical labor or time is put into it. As a coder, I can sit for 18 hours straight and produce code not worth the monitor it's sitting on. I can also sit for an hour and produce code that could be worth thousands.

Look at how much the NFL lost these past few weeks over an inconsequential percentage of their overall revenue.

 

[CardsFan88]

Interesting article I just saw on Yahoo.

Goodell moves past officiating embarrassments, says blown calls part of the ‘beauty of the game’
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-s...assments-says-blown-calls-000156635--nfl.html

In it, Roger Goodell talks about many things. Mostly absurd spin about the situation.

For instance, there being no data that there was a risk (yeah because only idiots NEED statistical data to connect the obvious dots).

So whenever something out of the normal happens there are no consequences because there is no data or study that has addressed it? Head meet sand.

But the title says it all that in RG mind that, blown calls are part of the beauty of the game. Really?

The guy actually tried to spin the crappy reffing as part of the beauty of the game. Unreal. I guess that's the 'thank you sir may I have another' mindset.

I understand Roger Goodell had a position. But stick to it on its merits. Don't spin crap like poor officiating doesn't pose a risk and introduces more of the beautiful aspects of the game. That last point almost sounds like if he believed it, why even hire back the regular refs? Wouldn't you then be getting rid of some of the beautiful parts of the NFL?

Also the argument that they needed this deal so that they could continue to 'grow the NFL' is asinine to a level of absurdity rarely seen. 9 billion dollars expected to grow to 18 billion by the end of the CBA (because of.....TELEVISION RIGHTS) won't stop growing because of the ref situation. It doesn't even make a dent like a spitball hitting a Panzer tank.

I'll say it once, I'll say it a thousand times. The people that run things in this world are morons and expect all of us to be bigger ones.

Glad the real refs are back.