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During the search to replace Mike Pereira as vice-president of officiating, we commented that Pereira’s replacement must have the talent to be the most visible  member of NFL management. By virtue of the weekly “Official Review” segment on the NFL Network’s NFL Total Access, the referee boss would be seen more often by the public than even the NFL commissioner.

Last September, we laid out the qualifications for the next head referee, based on participation in “Official Review”:

This involves presentation skills far more polished than a 10-second announcement over the public-address system. A successful candidate must also navigate and rise above the flood of faux hipness that the network talking heads constantly exude.

Carl Johnson was hired in the offseason to take Pereira’s job in the league office, while Pereira went to Fox Sports as sort of a rules interpretation jukebox. Since the first week of the season, Johnson has been unseen by the public, the “retired” Pereira has remained the de facto expert voice on controversial calls.

The NFL Network has opted to replace Official Review with a new segment simply titled Competition Committee. The segment can be just as simply summarized: one of three members of the NFL Competition Committee has six minutes to (1) discuss the most controversial rule of the week, (2) discuss why the rule is written the way it is, and (3) field lobbying efforts for changing said rule in the offseason. To fill the time, the member of the Competition Committee will often repeat several of the bullet points from earlier in the discussion until the viewer changes the channel.

The first week of Competition Committee featured a discussion of the process of the catch, after the Lions had an apparent touchdown taken off the scoreboard. Colts president Bill Pollian handled the duties (video). Week 2 was hosted by Titans coach and Competition Committee co-chairman Jeff Fisher holding an NFL Network stick mic way too close to his face in a room apparently no larger than a confessional (video). Fisher discussed the perceived inconsistency with roughing-the-passer penalties, but I could not watch the entire thing.

It’s not known why the NFL decided to shift the focus from the judges to the lawmakers, however, Fox Sports is willing to pick up the slack, with Pereira providing the instant Official Review, at least for the games broadcast by Fox.

If you saw something from Week 3 that deserves our attention, add it to the comments section of this post. (Referee assignments are listed after the jump.)

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Week 2: Ravens at Bengals

The league has zero tolerance for deliberate contact with the officials as Ravens coach John Harbaugh was fined $15,000 by the NFL. While fines are usually late-week business, the league levied this fine on Tuesday, underscoring the zero-tolerance nature of “impermissible verbal and physical contact with an official”. Harbuagh was arguing a fourth-quarter roughing-the-passer call when he made contact with line judge Ron Marinucci in the chest. (Sorry, no video available.) Harbaugh explained the contact in a Monday news conference prior to being fined:

I was a little animated in describing the strike zone, and I think he understood the emotions of it. I’ll make sure that I let him know that I think I was over the line in my animation without question, and that’s never something you want to do. And the point is we had great conversations with those guys throughout the game. We disagreed and it was animated, but it was respectful throughout. And I know Ron understood that it was respectful, so it should be OK.

Harbaugh was not penalized during the game for his actions. The fact that this came up in a Monday press conference, prior to any announcement of a fine from the league office, shows that Harbaugh’s actions were at least questionable, which historically has been used as a determining factor for a fine.

(Updated 9/26: Apparently, the fine was handed out on Tuesday, not Monday, which make Harbaugh’s comments from his press conference prior to the fine.)

Add your commentary on this week’s officiating to the comments section of this post. (Referee assignments are listed after the jump.)

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Week 1: Lions at Bears

It was a bitter pill to swallow for any team, let alone for the hapless Lions, who have cobbled together just two wins in as many seasons.

With 31 seconds to go, the Lions seemingly took the lead on a 25-yard touchdown pass to Calvin Johnson (video). As the celebration begins, officials signal an incomplete catch. Referee Gene Steratore explained, “The ruling on the field is that the runner did not complete the catch through the process of the catch.” He further elaborated to a pool reporter following the game:

Q: What is the rule used on the near Detroit touchdown at the end of the game?
Steratore: The ruling is that in order for the catch to be completed he has got to maintain possession of the ball throughout the entire process of the catch.

Q: He was on his behind before he rolled over. If he stayed on his behind would it have been a touchdown?
Steratore: No. We don’t play with the two feet or one knee or anything of that scenario. We’re talking now about the process of the catch. He’s catching the football, as he goes to the ground, he must maintain possession of the ball throughout the entire process. So as he continues to fall if he fell with two feet and his elbow hit the ground and came out it would be incomplete.

Q: It looked like he had the ball up in one hand while on his rear end, but there was continuation?
Steratore: Well, the process was not finished until he finished that roll and the entire process of that catch.

Q: How long did it take to determine that?
Steratore: We had the normal time [one minute] as far as the video was concerned. We would not run it any longer.

The “process of the catch” is a topic we covered frequently last season. It is also the most misunderstood.

The advent of the catch-process rule was to challenge professional receivers to demonstrate full control of a ball, even while doing so acrobatically or while colliding with the ground. It also eliminated “cheap” fumble opportunities, where a pass was marginally complete, and a receiver coughs up a ball that he really did not have full control over in the first place.

The complexity of the process of the catch was apparent in last year’s opening weekend, when Raiders receiver Louis Murphy went down to the turf and was ruled incomplete. It seemed that the NFL definition needed an offseason refinement, as there were similar issues in the next three weeks. However, the NFL maintained that a catch ruling as it was stated in the rulebook, Rule 8, Section 1, Article 3, Item 1:

If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball after he touches the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone.

In the Lions game, Johnson caught the ball in the air, and then contacted the ground with both feet, his left hand, and his knees.  When Johnson was in, essentially, a seated position, he was not down, because he needed his second hand to stop his momentum of falling further. It would have been safer had he tucked the ball in after making the two-handed grab, rather than holding in one hand.

(As a side note, the Fox television announcers Thom Brennaman and Brian Billick—at least in the clip I saw—showed a good understanding of the process of the catch, which is not often heard from the game callers.)

Calls to revise this rule, however, will revert us to the days where two toe taps and a brief fingertip grip on the ball qualified as a completed catch. That is hardly a professional standard.

If you saw something from the opening week games that you think we should cover, leave a comment in this thread. (Referee assignments listed after the jump.)

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