Maybe the SEC officials are not that bad after all?

You never know when I will read something that will send me into an outrage and luckily I know have a forum to get all of these issues off of my check. It was a quiet night at Tribute Lofts as I was doing some article reading while listening to some Kenny Chesney and Montgomery Gentry. I had just watched How I Met You Mother from Monday night and was starting to get over the Halloween disaster in J'ville from the previous weekend. All of that changed quickly when I ran into this article from the Austin American Statesman and it sent me into a YouTube rampage trying to find some examples of horrible officiating from college football. I was able to find a couple of examples that you can find at the bottom of this post. However, there are some above comments from the above article that need to be discussed.

From the article:
I called Verle Sorgen, director of instant replay for the league (Pac 10), and he gave me an emphatic explanation. He said there must be irrefutable proof that the original call was wrong. 

Sogren said if you gathered 100 college football experts in a room to look at the play, 99 of them would have to come to consensus. 

According to Dictionary.com the definition of irrefutable is: impossible to refute or disprove; incontrovertible. Well in my opinion, for each play to be considered irrefutable it would need 100 out of 100 experts to agree, not 99 out 100 as Mr. Sorgen claims. Furthermore, if Sorgen wants irrefutable proof, why does he put his replay officials in a booth by themselves. His claim is that he needs 99 out of 100 experts, while everyone would agree that is impossible why do these conferences not put 3-4 officials in the booth to make sure that they play is indeed irrefutable?

Look at the following plays, do these plays look at all irrefutable?

Look at the Indiana touchdown that was taken off the board...there is no way we can all agree if his foot was down or not so with everything that I know about football the call on the field should stand. Hopefully, a call like this never happens to UGA, because I would probably lose my mind. Remember that this was considered irrefutable proof last weekend.




One more example, the referee thought it was irrefutable and did not ask for further review. Do not forget that this is from the Pac-10 whose head of officials is on record for saying that for a play to be considered irrefutable 99 out of 100 experts must agree.




In my opinion the only thing irrefutable this football season is the officials and conferences are looking ridiculous for having to issue multiple apologies this season. This a problem that from the outside may seem easy to fix. However, one needs to remember that each conference is in charge so the definitions of irrefutable may be applied differently. Furthermore, the NCAA does not even recognize a National Championship at the FBS level, thus where does the motivation come to fix these problems?