An Unofficial interview with an NFL official

An Unofficial interview with an NFL official        By SteelPerch

 I bordered a plane bound for Dallas this Thursday morning and was a little pissed about having to watch the Steelers opening game from a hotel room.  Being a Penn State fan, I became little more annoyed to see about half of the plane was wearing Ohio State gear and were headed for the big Texas/OSU game on Saturday. To top it off I was seated in a middle seat, sandwiched between an old guy and the mom of an Ohio State football player who was literally covered head to toe with pictures of her son and "#1 OSU Mom" gear.  My hopes of being seated next to the hot blonde with the big rack were sadly dashed as usual.... (The football mom turned out to be a very nice lady and the mother of Ohio State Center Doug Datish.  Datish is ranked as one of the top 5 center's that will be available in next year's draft in some publications.)

Anyway, about halfway through the flight I noticed the old guy sitting to my left had a huge ring on his hand that looked like a SB ring.  After looking at it for a few minutes I noticed the words "National Football League" and the Super Bowl trophy in diamonds mounted on the face of the ring.  A very impressive ring no doubt, but how did this old man get a SB ring?

I asked the guy about it and he said it was ONE of his Super Bowl rings.  He paused for a moment, looked at the ring and blurted out "Oh yeah, Super Bowl XXII, that was Doug Williams big game you know.  Redskins beat the Bills that year, 1988 it was. Played that one San Diego, nice city San Diego." 

I asked how he was involved and he said it was one of three SB's he officiated as head linesman. The man's name was Dale Harmer, an NFL referee from 1978 to 2001, and now a part time replay official.  I was totally unaware that officials got rings for officiating the big game, a nice little perk of the job I guess.   

Dale was sharp as a tack, very talkative, and willing to answer pretty much anything I threw at him.  Most of our conversation revolved around instant replay, as that is what he is up to these days.  Some little known officiating insight I got from Dale during our conversation: 

The replay that you see on your TV set, or on the Jumbotron at the stadium IS NOT what the officials see.  The images we see are from the TV station cameras.  The NFL has it's own sets of cameras, eight total, from different angles of the stadium.  Dale said that often-times the officials have the opposite angle view from what we see at home.  Sometimes we see things at home from a much better or worse viewpoint then what they see in the booth.

He also said that when the referee sticks his head under the hood and they go to commercial, usually he is looking at blank screen.  It takes a few minutes for them to cue up all eight camera angles so the referee is usually just waiting.  That will change this year though, now they will show whatever they have available first instead of making the guy wait for all of the different angles.

I asked him if he thought full time officials would improve the officiating in the league.  His response was a chuckle, and a quick "probably not"  He went on to say that he feels the officials get the calls right a very high percentage of the time, and there will always be some human error because of the speed of the game.  With instant replay they are even better than in the past.  He feels the officials should be full time and paid enough so they wouldn't need to work another job, but that it wouldn't improve officiating if it was a year round job.  It's kinda crazy that a multi-billion dollar organization has part time employees that are so crucial to the game, and they make next to nothing.  These guys deserve to earn enough money not to have to work another job at the very least.

Unfortunately the whole "challenge flag" issue in the Dolphins game happened after I spoke with him or I would have brought that up too.  A guy across the aisle overheard our conversation and asked if Dale was a Steelers fan.  He laughed and said "Officially, I am employed by the NFL so I have no favorites, but you know"  Dale is a graduate of California Univ. of PA and resides in the Pittsburgh area.

All in all one of the more eventful flights I have been on.

~A view from atop the Steel Perch