by Ryan McGee
Dad
“What was the one play that made you say, ‘I can’t believe that just happened!’”
I wish I could remember who the player was, but it was a defensive back at Pitt. The wide receiver and this defender were across the field. In my earliest days in the ACC, Mr. Neve had always taught us that you look through your play so you can anticipate what’s happening. So, I was watching my guys downfield, but I was also looking at the quarterback and saw he was going to throw it deep down the other sideline.
That DB had it played perfectly, had great inside position. He went to intercept the pass, but I immediately thought, Well, he jumped too soon. He had timed it wrong. But hell, he stayed in the air. Like, hung there, and he intercepted the ball. I thought, Did I really see what I think I saw?
The side judge was Tommy Tomczak, and at halftime he pulled me into the showers away from the other guys and asked, “Did you get a good look at that interception?” I told him yes, and he said, “That damn kid stayed in the air! He jumped too soon, but he just hung up there until the ball got there.” I told him that was exactly what I thought. We both were so relieved someone else saw it because we realized we weren’t crazy.
But we also agreed that maybe we should keep that to ourselves.
Dad
“What’s the biggest misperception about college football officials?”
That we just show up and officiate a game and then leave, and that we show up for money and fame.
No one knows about all the work that went into the preparation for that game. Rules clinics and local meetings and film study and rules exams and scrimmages and physical conditioning, all of that. One year before a season opener I did the math. Before the first ball had been placed on a tee, I had already worked 300 hours that year on officiating. By season’s end, what I was paid versus how much I’d worked came to about 12 cents per hour.
Dad
“Did any big power broker, like a conference commissioner, ever try to influence how you called a game?”
Never. Not even close. Now, there were administrators who would be on the sideline and weren’t happy with a call. During my small college days, we were at Mars Hill College one day and they were hosting Liberty University—I guess they were Liberty Baptist College then. At one point, Dr. Jerry Falwell was all the way out on the field, screaming, “Do you work for Mars Hill?!”
But we never saw the conference commissioners anywhere other than the rules clinic. And even then, it was just to stop by and check in. People forget officials are not employees of the conference. They are independent contractors who are assigned games by the conference.
Gene Corrigan, who was commissioner of the ACC during most of my first stint in the conference, we would only see at the clinic. But he wouldn’t have input on how we officiated. He would help make decisions about uniforms or something like that. Like the year he said we were no longer wearing shorts.
Dad
“Wait…you wore shorts?!”
Yes. Those were only in the ACC and only for a couple of seasons in the 1980s. I think I wore them in only five or six games. The idea was that it was so hot in the Southeast in August and September, they would be cooler. But they were those heavy polyester coaches’ shorts, and we had socks pulled up over our calves, so there was nothing cool about it.
Ryan
They certainly didn’t look cool, especially on the chunkier officials. I have one photo of Dad in his shorts, standing with Doug Rhoads on the field prior to a game at Duke. Rhoads threatened to send his old FBI coworkers to my house if I ever published it on ESPN.com.
Dad
Mr. Neve was like a drill sergeant about a lot of things, but especially when it came to uniforms. We weren’t allowed to wear long sleeves because he liked how short sleeves looked. The white hats would plead with him to wear long sleeves when we worked games at Maryland late in the season. We even had a crew in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl, the NCAA Division III championship, played in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in December. It was cold, and they begged him to not wear short sleeves. He told them he appreciated them calling and that he could send a replacement crew if they didn’t want to wear the short sleeves. They stopped complaining. But it was 20 degrees at kickoff.
At one of my earliest ACC rules clinics, Mr. Neve had us dress in our uniforms and stand out in the motel parking lot, lined up for inspection like I’d had to do in the Army National Guard. “You need new shoes…Your belt is the wrong color…You need a new hat…”
While we were out there, a door to one of the rooms opened up. It was Bones McKinney, the legendary Wake Forest basketball coach, in the same town where we were for a speaking engagement. He came out of the door, froze, went back into his room, and peeked at us through the curtains. Then he finally came back out and said, “Thank goodness it’s just you guys. I saw all these referees out here and I thought I had died and gone to hell.”
And finally, the question that was asked the most. Like, dozens of times. Drumroll, please…
Ryan
“What’s the one call you wish you could have another look at?
Okay, I’ll take this one because I know the answer. So does Sam, and so should you, by now. Yes, it’s that second quarter touchdown in the ’85 Citrus Bowl, the play Dad still insists he got wrong and Sam and I still believe he got right.
David Miles was the BYU receiver who caught that pass. While working on this book, I found Miles in Salt Lake City, working as the director of event and support services at the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. On December 28, 1985, he was a reserve sophomore receiver who hadn’t expected to see the field against the Buckeyes, let alone catch a touchdown pass.
When I got him on the phone, Miles told me that just the day before he’d been talking smack about that catch when an Ohio State loyalist coworker had brought up the game. He also told me that the mouse pad on his desk is a black-and-white photo of him celebrating the score in Orlando, his arms raised in celebration next to Dad, whose arms are also in the air, signaling touchdown, and that led to telling me about all of the joy that moment has brought to his life for more than three and a half decades, even in a loss.
When Miles was sent into the game late in the second quarter, his only job was to run a decoy route down the middle while the real pass play was run to the far side of the field. “I was half-jogging, to be honest,” Miles recalled. “I saw Robbie Bosco planting his foot to throw, but he was looking away from Mark Bellini, our No. 1 receiver who was supposed to get the ball on that play. I realized something was wrong and the ball was in the air, so I pivoted and really started running downfield to get under it.
“When I caught the ball around the 8-yard line and turned toward the end zone, the defender was right behind me and we ran right at your dad. All I was thinking was, ‘Get the ball inside that front corner pylon…get that ball inside the front corner pylon…’”
For 35 years we have known that David Miles did get that ball inside the front corner pylon. But what we haven’t known is whether or not his right foot stepped out of bounds before the ball broke the plane as he planted to leap toward paydirt.
Who was right? Dad, saying he missed the call, or Sam and me, saying that he was right? The answer was finally going to be revealed!
“Your Dad is right; my right foot was on the line,” Miles said. “But I have said ever since that day that the official on that play, your dad, had no chance to see it clearly. The defender was diving for me as I was diving for the end zone, and his head was completely blocking the view of my foot.
“Thank goodness we didn’t have replay then, because if we had, I think they would have taken my touchdown away and we would have it at the 1-yard line. But we didn’t have replay, and there were only a handful of TV cameras there that day. He made the best call he could in the time that it happened. He trusted that I g
ot into the end zone, because that’s what he had to work with that day.”
Sensing he might have crushed my 14-year-old soul, David Miles had a message for the man whom until now he’d known only as “the ref on my touchdown.” Now the guy on his mousepad has a name: Dr. Jerry McGee of North Carolina.
“I scored a touchdown because your father said I did. That makes it official. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. In 1985, I was a really big deal because of it. And in 2020, I’m still having fun with it. So, if that’s his one big missed call that’s been bugging him all these years, maybe it will help him to know that he has helped make my life a lot more enjoyable during all those same years.
“You tell your dad he was a great college football official. And I’m really glad he was officiating on that play.”
Sam (still defiant)
I still think the hand with the ball might have crossed the goal line before he planted his foot.
Dad (laughing)
Okay, so I only got 64,479 of 64,480 plays right.
Family Timeout with Danny Caddell
“I had kind of gotten used to crappy referee’s tickets, so on this day I figured there had to have been a mistake. We were damn near on the bench!”
It is Christmas 2019, and Uncle Danny has me rolling. We’ve been talking about this book, and about our trip together to Dad’s final game a decade earlier. He laughs when he recalls the first big UNC–Clemson game in ’83, when he caught Dad throwing up a prayer to the football gods while the Tar Heels kept throwing Hail Marys in his direction. Danny hadn’t heard the “it’s a sad frog who can’t pull for his own pond” quote gifted to me and Sam by his father in the skybox at Death Valley. He reminds me their mother, Mary Caddell, also known as Ma-Ma, attended a few games as well, and when he does, I suddenly remember that she sat with me for the first-ever night game at Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium, a win over Indiana in a 1984.
We are having a good time.
But not as good of a time as Danny had one Saturday evening in Tallahassee, having traveled to the Florida Panhandle from Eastern North Carolina with his best friend to see Dad officiate in one of the sport’s greatest rivalries, Miami versus Florida State. Over Christmas ham, he tells me the story.
“We were on the front row, right on the 50-yard line. I mean, we’re so close I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the teams had said, ‘Here’s a jersey, y’all just come on down here with us.’”
Uncle Danny remembers Dad walking out for the pregame warmups, in uniform, and coming straight to them with a couple of game programs that had been left in the officials’ locker room. Soon, the FSU fans were staring, wondering what in the world a ref was doing talking to these guys.
“Your daddy realized that we were drawing a crowd. He says, really loud so that they can all hear him, ‘Hey, Danny, did you bring your glasses?!’ I said, ‘No, man, I don’t believe I brought them with me...’”
According to Danny, Dad threw his hands up.
“He said, ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do! I don’t have mine, either! You know I can’t see a damn thing without my glasses!’ He shook our hands like, ‘Oh well, I’ll do my best…’ and went onto the field. Now these Florida State people are all like, wait a minute, what the hell is going on here?
“We just waved and shouted to him, ‘Have a great game!’”
10. Changing of the Guard and of the Game
The early 2000s was a time of uneasiness for our family, still trying to find our footing after the loss of Mom. But it was also a complicated time for everyone, and the college football world was certainly no exception. By 2004, another sea change of conference realignment was rolling. Miami and Virginia Tech followed Dad, leaving the Big East for the ACC. Boston College soon followed.
The entire world became unmoored on 9/11, when hijacked aircraft were steered into the World Trade Center, rural Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon. Among the very first responders to the Pentagon attack was Northern Virginia firefighter and ACC back judge Pat Ryan. Another ACC official, Colonel Timon Oujiri, was working in the Pentagon at the time of the attack.
Dad
Our first game back after 9/11 was Maryland at Wake Forest, and from that day forward, our routine changed forever. The most sobering moment for me was when we were in the locker room getting dressed, like I had hundreds of times, but this time a security team came into the room. They said, “Okay, let’s go over some procedures here in case there is a bomb…”
The reality of hearing that was hard to believe. “If there is a terrorist attack on the stadium, we will come to you and get you off the field and we will take you to a predetermined location until we get the all clear.”
I was at that game. It’s odd to think back now on how unusual it felt because in the years since we have all become so used to standing in line to have our bags and bodies searched. But that day, seeing those long lines at every gate of Groves Stadium, was unsettling. I was on the sideline, and even with 25,000 people there, watching a good one-score game, it was the quietest football field I’ve ever been on. Everyone, including Dad, his crew, and the two teams, had arrived assuming it would simply be another fall Saturday, a chance to return to normalcy. But reality settled in after kickoff. There was a new normal.
Ever since that season, officials take part in what’s called the “110 Minute Meeting,” a gathering of stadium, team, game, and security officials to go over any safety concerns.
Dad
One of the questions that people have always asked is if I ever felt unsafe officiating football games. For nearly 40 years, my answer to that was that I’d only felt uneasy at a handful of high school games, where some rough guys might have stalked me during the game, and then I had to walk to my car alone in some small town somewhere.
Even after seeing an official hit by a liquor bottle thrown from the stands at Georgia Tech and having tires slashed in our hotel parking lot in Charlottesville, the only time I felt uneasy was during those days after 9/11 and then the very next year. We had a game at Maryland right in the middle of that awful time when the Washington D.C. sniper had the whole city fearing for their safety. There were two guys shooting people at random all over the area for three weeks.
When we went to rent cars at the hotel, we were running zig-zags and hiding behind other cars. Everyone in the city was. We got to the stadium and it’s time for us to take up our spots during pregame warmups, an hour before the game. All we can think is, We’re going to be out there in striped shirts in a stadium that’s open on one end. We’re perfect targets. So, we wore our black jackets. We really were nervous about the whole thing.
In the middle of such a terrifying atmosphere, they grabbed levity wherever they could get it. ACC officiating coordinator Tommy Hunt decided to make a surprise visit to show support for the crew placed into such a stressful situation. Like any other job, the staff tends to act a little differently when the boss is around. So, when Dad was walking out of the locker room and saw Hunt about to walk in, he greeted him extra loudly to send a heads-up back to the crew. “WELL, HEY TOMMY. WHAT A NICE SURPRISE.”
From the locker room, the shouts came back, “Yeah, okay, f--k you, McGee! F--king Tommy Hunt wouldn’t come up here into this f--king mess!” just as the boss strolled in.
The 2000s also brought a swelling of the bowl calendar. In 1990, there were 18 bowl games. In 2001, that number was up to 25. By the end of the decade it was 35. The good news is that meant more opportunities for an official to spend their holidays working one more game. The bad news was that with new games popping up and disappearing like a Whack-a-Mole game, they no had no idea where those bowl assignments might be.
In 2000, Dad worked the Motor City Bowl in Detroit between Marshall and Cincinnati in the Pontiac Silverdome. On Christmas Day 2001, it was USC versus Utah in the Sega Las Vegas Bowl. The next year brought Southern Miss and
Oklahoma State in the Houston Bowl.
Dad
The best part of that Vegas Bowl was before the game. We’d had our pregame meeting and we’d gotten dressed and were waiting to go out, and there was a knock on the locker room door. It was a pair of Vegas showgirls. “Do you guys mind if we get dressed in here?” We said, No ma’am, not at all.
Say what you want about the Vegas Bowl, but that never happened at the Fiesta or the Rose.
It wasn’t that Dad wasn’t having as much fun as he’d had in years past; it’s that it felt like no one was having as much fun as in years past. Instant replay was in its infancy. So was social media. Both tools could be a college football official’s best friend and worst enemy all at once. Film had become video, video had become digital, and high-definition video became the standard. Now, film study, previously limited to Friday pregame and offseason rules meetings, was landing in email inboxes all the time. For college officials who were working their day jobs during the week, their part-time gig was starting to feel like a poorly paying second full-time gig.
Speaking of money, the college football arms race was moving into a rate of speed that no one could have foreseen. Dad was a firsthand witness to the ushering in of this new era, serving on multiple NCAA committees, most notably as the representative of Division II schools on the NCAA Presidents Council, in the room with the leaders of the FBS institutions that were steering the sport he officiated into uncharted financial territory.
Dad
It was a front row seat to seeing where Notre Dame and Ohio State and schools like that, with so much football money to make and spend, were going to take the sport, whether the others could keep up or not.