At the end of a blurb about Bill Belichik’s opinion regarding the replacement officials, Mike Florio throws out this zinger:
Strategically, they’d be wise to do so. Eventually, the locked-out officials will be back, and it will be impossible for them to complete ignore who had their backs- and who didn’t- when making close calls in real time.
This strikes me as a foolish statement for a couple reasons. First, Robert Kraft is the owner of the Patriots, so he’s partially responsible for the referee situation in the NFL, regardless of Bill Belichik’s position. So if the refs are going to hold grudges against teams, why would they spare the Patriots?
Second, if the officials get what they want, but then turn around and behave as Florio implies, how does that make them any better than the replacement refs which are supposedly worse? Arguably, it makes them worse. It’s one thing to makes mistakes (even the regulars do that), it’s another to deliberately punish one team or another because of some personal pique against one team or another. It violates a key element of being a game official, impartiality. Implying they would do so isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for them.
With all due respect to the striking game officials, I doubt we’ll see much of an impact. They tried to strong arm the league once before and their bluff was called. The replacement officials performed just fine and the regular officials had to come back and accept whatever deal they got. I think we’ll see an identical result. While being an NFL official isn’t easy, it’s not rocket science and the guys the NFL has recruited already know how to officiate fooball games. Plus, for all these replacement guys know, they’re auditioning for a permanent job and a nice bump in their income. That gives them plenty of incentive to do the job and do it well.