why not have a third party association of officials who leases out their refs to professional sports leagues. the association would oversee and review the performance of the refs in their respective sport, rather than the pro sports league or the refs themselves doing so. the association would pay the refs their share of the money that comes in from the pro sports leagues, rather than having refs work for the leagues which they officiate. any league that wants the public to believe that they care about fair and just officiating would basically be forced to use this third party association in order to prove they are doing what it takes to keep the funny business out of their sport. there is no point for me to work out in my mind all of the logistics needed to make this work but the idea is there, what do you guys think about it? why hasn't there been something like this?
i've read articles and heard others proposing a similar idea. it sounds good but it seems ultimately the refs could still be bribed by the league if it really wanted to...
It's a good idea and a start. I myself am for a different pay structure in which bonuses are allocated for cleanly called games. IOW, utilizing a third party company to review game tapes and go over calls and no calls. Clean called games generate a bonus that is allocated between the refs. As clean games accumulate, the refs with the most clean games get to officiate the playoffs, and so on and so forth. However, the refs with the most "dirty" games, or games with multiple missed calls, get either violations that can lead to additional training and ultimately dismissal.
Each game should be reffed by 1 NBA official, 1 Third Party Official and a mysterious masked man with a sword.
i am almost sure the refs who get to ref the playoffs and finals are the ones who are graded out the best during the season. as much as people don't want to think so, the best refs already are doing the reffing. while 3rd party involvement may go a ways toward fixing perception, the humans reffing the games are still going to be the same. from watching both sports, NBA refs are significantly better and more consistent than college refs and college refs are significantly better and more consistent than FIBA refs. the guys who make it to the NBA didn't just fall from the sky, they had to be graded well at other levels to even make it here. i don't know why people think the refs performance isn't looked at and used to affect salaries, big games reffed, dismissal, etc. at the end of the day, if you've already got the best graded people moving up to get the best jobs, firing them all or, in one of the weirder suggestions for fixing officiating, fining refs for bad calls is going to do nothing but force you to drop down to the next tier of competency for your officials, which will only make it worse. that doesn't mean you don't keep evaluating, keep firing the really bad ones, keep hiring the best young ones, but i would bet the NBA doesn't attempt to have bad refs. considering it's by far the hardest game to ref with an order of magnitude more subjective calls than any other sport and considering people jump all over any imbalance in the distribution of those subjective calls for a given game and cry conspiracy and fix and hurt the NBA's reputation by doing so, i doubt the NBA isn't trying to get the best refs they can. so while a 3rd party may help create distance between the league and refs and help perception, there really isn't much of a quick fix (no pun intended) for the officiating problem. unless you can figure out how to make basketball a game without hundreds of subjective calls and interactions per game.
Nothing will work. As long as the following question cannot be answered consistently. What is a foul?
I think this problem can be solved with a little more transparency. It's my understanding that every game is reviewed and graded for the accuracy of the calls. Referees receive a report after every game that shows which calls they got right and which they got wrong. Why not make these reports public at the end of every season? I don't think many games will be tampered with if the refs know that the league's ruling on every call will be seen by all. This will also keep the league honest in the way it grades its refs.
I think JVG said this and others as well.. don't take credit for other peoples ideas. thats plagiarism.
