One of the bigger stories leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl is NFL officiating and how it seems to benefit the Kansas City Chiefs.
The two pivotal calls in their three-point victory over Buffalo—both wrong, in my opinion—are the most recent examples.
Rather than debate them, though, I have this question:
Which sport is the most difficult to officiate?
Here’s a case for and against football, basketball, baseball and hockey. You decide.
Football: This game has the most officials (7) but also the most players on the field at one time (22). With so many formations and different plays, there’s a lot to look at on every snap.
Except when time is running out, officials have time between plays to get in position, assess the arrangement of players, and anticipate, at least to some extent, what the team with the ball is going to try to do.
With each official assigned to scrutinize specific areas of the field, there should be few outright surprises for the striped shirts.
Basketball: The player-to-whistle ratio is almost as small as football, with 10 players to three zebras at any moment (3.33:1).
And the rules are pretty straightforward: double-dribble, walking, hitting a player while he’s in the act of shooting, running over a defender, blocking an offensive player’s path, etc.
But the pace of play can, at times, be breakneck—adding to the difficulty by testing the outer limits of a referee’s ability to keep up with athletes who usually are younger by a decade or much more, in peak condition and often given to amazing athletic feats.
Baseball: There’s an umpire behind the plate and one at each base, except when two additional umps are added in the postseason to prowl the foul lines. (They’re usually so close to first and third base as to be virtually incapable of contributing in any meaningful way).
Besides balls and strikes, which almost exclusively is the purview of the ump behind the plate, the crew’s responsibilities largely consist of fair or foul, safe or out, and over the fence or not.
What increases the degree of difficulty is that they never know when they’ll be needed to decide these things, because they never know what will happen each time a pitch is thrown.
Hockey: Two referees and two linespersons officiate an NHL game, and what separates them from their counterparts in other sports is that they must be able to skate as well as the 12 players they’re monitoring (when no one is in the penalty box).
I’d also argue that no other sport is as fast-paced or spontaneously physical.
All four sports have some type of instant reply to review outcomes that are unclear to the naked eye in a split second. Though, not even replay assures a correct decision.
Just under half of all plays challenged across these four sports are reversed.
What separates officiating one of these sports compared to another, in my view, is the extent to which human judgment can affect a particular call.
In football, for example, are defender and receiver simply hand-fighting as they race downfield with the ball in the air heading their way? Or is one interfering with the other? Most times, it depends on who is making the call.
And when is an offensive lineman holding as a defender tries to rush the quarterback or a ball carrier scans for a hole to dash through? (The widespread acknowledgment is that holding occurs on every play but isn’t usually called.)
On the basketball court, is it charging when an offensive player runs over a defender on the way down the lane? Or is the defender blocking? Is the glass half-empty or half-full?
Nearly every interaction between offense and defense involves some type of individual move that appears to infringe on a tenet of the sport.
But, like holding in the NFL, most of the time it’s “let ‘em play.”
Baseball’s biggest inconsistency is the home plate ump’s strike zone.
One night, low balls are strikes; another night, they’re balls. Same with high pitches, and inside or outside. The X factor is who’s behind the plate.
Icing and offsides are pretty obvious in hockey; otherwise, the rules, it seems, are mostly left to interpretation in the moment.
As you ponder a questionable call in Sunday’s game, keep this debate in mind.
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Denny Dressman’s 17th book, a collaboration with Kansas City artist Anthony High titled Black Baseball’s Heyday – Capturing An Era in Art and Words, will be published in late spring. You can write to Denny at dennydressman@comcast.net.