Columnist Dean Juipe: Replacement refs seemed to do OK

Dean Juipe

Monday, Sept. 10, 2001 | 10:40 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

There were glitches, moments of indecision and situations that required group discussion.

But aren't there always?

The 112 men who officiated Sunday's National Football League games appeared to come through the ordeal with fairly good marks, which has to be seen as distressing news for the unionized officials who sat at home as part of a work stoppage that already has "ill advised" written all over it.

If there was a concern that the games would dissolve into pandemonium and roughhousing under the substitute officials, those fears can now be allayed. With the quality of play neither influenced nor unduly affected by the replacement refs, it's easy to feel the National Football League Referees' Union has made a grave mistake.

Didn't these guys read up on the 1981 Air Traffic Controllers' Union strike, or recall the Major League Baseball Umpires' Union shot through the foot in 1999? In both of those cases, callousness and greed led to decisions that rendered each of those mismanaged unions all but obsolete.

The "regular" NFL officials may be doomed to a similar fate.

Already, what had been a generous compensation offer by the league has been pulled from the table. Now the Referees' Union is stuck on the sidelines by its own doing, left to hope the replacement whistle blowers stumble to such a degree that the league will reopen labor discussions in the near future.

But based on the lack of turbulence in the NFL's opening weekend, the old refs may be history. And given their inglorious track record, the common fan may say good riddance.

NFL officials may be underpaid but the league was taking significant steps to right that wrong with a final proposal of a 60 percent increase in salary this year, leading to a doubling of salary -- to a maximum of $139,980 -- by 2003. When the union rejected that offer last Thursday, the NFL committed itself to replacement officials for at least three weeks of the new season.

The subs did fine in Week 1, even if there were singular incidents that can be second-guessed. (An irony: Oakland receiver Tim Brown was quoted last week as saying "I really believe we may be the only team in the league that may benefit from replacement referees," alluding to the Raiders' poor reputation with the regular officials. Yet in the first half of his team's 27-24 victory at Kansas City, Brown was hit with a personal foul penalty for overzealously protesting a replay-reviewed call that went against the Raiders.)

Given the lack of cohesive officiating and uniform penalty calling in the NFL in recent years, hiring a completely new cast of officials -- each of whom has collegiate experience, if nothing else -- arguably had merit of its own even before this labor dispute.

Every striking air traffic controller in America was fired in 1981 and the crisis passed with little disruption of service. Likewise, when Major League Baseball surprised its umpires' union in '99 by accepting the mass resignations of 50 umpires -- later amended to 22 resignations -- play continued unabated, and today those 22 men are seen as dolts who blindly followed their leader's erroneous advice.

A similar fortune may be awaiting these misguided football officials.