by Ryan McGee
But if you lose a big game like that, a game in which you were clearly the better team, who are you going to blame? Your play-calling? Your coaching staff that you hired? Your players whom you recruited? No way. You’re going to blame seven strangers.
It was a pretty intense conversation, and it was a conversation that Coach Beamer and I continued to have a long time after that. Frank is one of my favorite people I’ve ever met in college football. He’s just a good man. So, when he was that upset, it was big indicator to me about the increasing stress level for these guys.
The Internet, particularly social media, was also stripping away the anonymity that most officials had always held so dear. Ron Cherry, the white hat for most of Dad’s biggest games in those final years, found himself accidentally famous during a 2007 NC State–Maryland game when he announced a penalty on TV, describing the personal foul as “Number 69 was giving him the business.” It was actually a repeat of a description given by NFL referee Ben Drieth 20 years earlier, but YouTube didn’t exist when Drieth was on the field. By day’s end, some corners of Twitter were calling Cherry out for being a showboat, while others had created faux Twitter accounts claiming to be Cherry and posting smart-ass commentary on college games in the “giving him the business” style.
Websites and bloggers started tracking officials’ game assignments and flags thrown in those games, seeking to detect patterns and habits. Instant replay moved into overdrive in 2006, and the ACC was among the pioneers in really pushing the use of video, including the establishment of a conference command center, where the coordinator could keep an eye on every game at once, instantly watching, clipping, and sending out any plays that might need a second look.
Dad
I always joke that the first time I used replay was a long time before that. We had a game in an NFL stadium that had a Jumbotron long before everyone had. We had a call on a turnover and there was a little bit of a question about exactly what happened, so we had a huddle on the field to discuss it.
I said to them, “You guys keep talking and don’t pay attention to me, just act like I’m listening.” While they did, I was nodding and everything, but I was really watching the replay on the Jumbotron. On the replay it was pretty clear what had happened, so I said, “Okay, we were right”.…and we broke the huddle.
First down!
The assumption by many was that officials would resist replay, viewing it as some sort of Big Brother enemy designed for no reason other than to make them look bad, or a John Henry situation, where man was doomed to be replaced by machines. But in reality, they embraced it.
Okay, they embraced what it was in the beginning.
Dad
Our argument was that we would much rather stop the game on Saturday and get the call right than find out on Monday we had gotten it wrong. In my final years, replay was still pretty limited. We might have two stoppages of play per game and it was still being used only as a tool to get the call right. For me, plays on the sideline, on the goal line, catch or no catch, I wanted to get the call right just like I had always wanted to get it right. But I welcomed the help. As long as it remained that—help.
The clarity was great and so was the fact that replay really proved that we were right way more than we were wrong. People were really shocked that only a few calls needed to be overturned. But the never-ending scrutiny, that wasn’t so great.
But we had a lot of conversations in those first years of replay with my fellow veteran officials about our fear of what the future might be for officiating. We could see a lot of young guys coming up raised on replay, and they were going to call the games like the NFL was doing with replay. If there was any question about catch or no catch, it was going to be a catch. Anytime it was a fumble or no fumble, it was a going to be a fumble. Because now they could go to replay and get it fixed.
Now what’s happened is exactly what we were worried about. They do that, and you go to replay, but if there’s not a good look, then you’re stuck with what was called on the field. All of this, even though the guy on the field in his heart might think a play was out of bounds, but he called it inbounds so that they could get the help. But that help might not always be there. And when it’s not, it’s a mess.
Conversations like this became a big part of the enjoyment of those final three seasons, as the new young officials started rolling in. Doug Rhoads, Dad’s old crewmate, hung up his whistle after 275 games worked and took over as the ACC officiating coordinator in 2007. Always a cutting-edge guy via his FBI training, Rhoads pushed video everywhere he could. He was never without his iPad, perpetually loaded with football plays about which he knew he was going to be questioned by coaches, media members, and his officials. He launched a website where those videos were available for review by his officials, day and night. He handed out his cell phone number to sportswriters and TV commentators and held regular Q&A sessions at conference events, eager to head off any would-be controversies by way of preemptive education.
With that same strategy in mind, Rhoads went to his old-school friends who were still on the field and asked them to embrace their mentorship roles. Dad certainly did.
Dad
What was cool was that even with all of the new technology there was to embrace, the lessons I tried to hand down to the young guys were exactly what I had been taught by my mentors, going all the way back to high school.
Dad would repeat the words of Mr. Allen Gaddy: “Timing is everything.”
He would serve up the instructions of Mr. Cecil Longest: “Stay out the way. Play deep. Only call the obvious stuff. Learn all you can from the guys around you.”
He would preach the lessons of Mr. Norval Neve: “Look through your play so you can anticipate what’s happening,” and, “Let your mind digest what your eyes have seen.”
And he told the new guys what he had been told when he was the new guy, what Mr. W.C. Clary had always said: “Anybody in the stands could referee 95 percent of the plays that are going to happen here today. You’re here to officiate the other five percent.”
Sam
As a lawyer, I think about that last lesson every single time I am in a courthouse. That applies to being a field judge and it applies to being a judge in the courtroom. I will be sitting in a county courthouse tomorrow, and I will watch a lot of hearings before mine, and most of it will be easy. But mine will not, and the judge has to be ready to deal with mine as much as he is the easy stuff. That’s the mark of anyone who has to make big decisions and do it on the spot. You can either handle those really difficult calls or you can’t. Everyone thinks they can. But they aren’t in that robe or in that officials’ uniform, are they?
The summer after officiating in the January 1, 2008, Cotton Bowl, Dad also took another piece of advice that he had received from his mentors and called Doug Rhoads.
For all of the processes that college football officiating gets right, they are horrible at goodbyes. Now, they are really good about commemorating big moments, with watches and rings for big games and plaques honoring those who have hit milestones of 100, 200, 300 or more games worked.
But they fumbled retirements like a punt returner muffing an incoming kick. They loved officiating so much that they almost always hung on too long. They would get hurt or become slow and end up saddled with a schedule quality that was far beneath their glory days.
It was the officiating equivalent of Willie Mays falling down in the outfield in the 1973 World Series.
Dad
These were my heroes, and you would have to watch them on this decline.
It would put the supervisor in a hell of a difficult spot. They have to figure out a way to tell them that they are done. As gently as they know how, they have to say, “You have been so great for the game of college football. We appreciate you so much. I love you. But you’re done.”
There’s no good way to handle that. Our super
visors would try to make it better by rewarding a veteran official with a bowl game, and then when that game was over, they’d walk into the locker room and say, “That was your last game.” As well-intentioned as everyone was, nobody could get it right, and that created a lot of bitterness. I always wanted to see the veteran guys come to the rules clinic and have some beer and tell some stories and have a good time. I wanted them to still be in the family, but they would be so hurt about how they were shown the door that you couldn’t get a lot of them to come back.
My closest friends on my crew, guys like Watts Key and Rick Page, I told them I was not going to let that happen. I also knew that Doug and I were so close that he was never going to tell me I was done, so I wanted to do that for him.
He told Rhoads he would be done at season’s end. For real this time. In the history of the ACC, no football official had ever called the conference coordinator to say that they would be retiring. As of 2020, no one has done it since.
Sam
Neither Ryan nor I went to the Rose Bowl or Cotton Bowl in ’07 and ’08. We didn’t think either one of those was going to be his last game. But when he was on the field at the Rose Bowl, I was in Miami because we were there to watch Wake Forest in the Orange Bowl. We were watching Dad on TV in a sports bar, and I had a moment of regret. I thought about his threat to intercept a pass and take off for the end zone.
Suddenly, I thought, maybe I should have gone, you know, just in case…
I had the same feeling during the Cotton Bowl one year later. I couldn’t make it to Dallas because of work, but I was back home on New Year’s Day. I had a moment of panic, suddenly scooping up my toddler daughter and posing her for a picture with Dad on TV in the background.
But in ’08, with the bridge officially burned behind him at the ACC offices, we knew this would be it. At that summer’s ACC clinic, everyone else knew it, too. Rhoads made the announcement to the officials.
The morning of the dreaded one-mile run, Dad experienced a genuine Hollywood sports movie moment. In the middle of his fourth and final lap, a group of the younger guys who had already finished spotted him. One of them ran out to meet him, ran alongside, and said, “You want some company?” Dad replied, “Absolutely. Misery loves company.” Then another runner joined them. And another. And another. When Dad came to the finish line for his 27th timed-mile run as a Division I college football official, he was surrounded by a half-dozen younger colleagues.
He repaid that magical moment with a stunt worthy of the Booker and McGee Prank Hall of Fame.
Dad
We were having a big dinner in a really dark restaurant banquet room. Everyone had some drinks. I grabbed Mike Safirt, a second-generation ACC official. I’d worked games with his father and now with him. I told him I needed his help.
A few minutes later, I went to the front of the room and I dinged my glass with a spoon to get everyone’s attention. I told them what a joy of my life it had been to be an official, the greatest fraternity in the world. I asked that they indulge me and allow me to give out some awards.
I would say like, “We all work so hard out here. You take a guy like Chris Brown back over there. He does it the right way. And that’s why I’d like to give him this award…” He was a great official, and he was thrilled with the recognition. He came up and Mike handed him a trophy. It was beautiful. We gave out four of them. I thanked the room and said that I hoped they could find a special place for in their homes for their new awards. Then I said to Mike, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
A little bit later, everyone else was leaving and the manager of the restaurant came running up. “What the hell do you guys think you’re doing?!” They told him they’d had a great time and they showed him their trophies. “You can’t have those! Those are ours!”
Mike and I had taken a bunch of “Restaurant of the Year” trophies from the front of the place. That’s what we had given out.
It was a beautiful final season, and a busy one. When Duke and Georgia Tech met midseason, Dad caught himself getting a little emotional during the pregame. He was thinking about his very first college football game when he was 13, taken there by his daddy, Marshall Caddell. That game was Georgia Tech versus Duke, at that same stadium.
When a couple of ACC colleagues suffered injuries, Rhoads called Dad and asked him to step in. As a result, he worked the biggest schedule of his career in the final year of that career. That allowed him to hit nearly all of the old-school ACC stadiums and shake the hands of everyone he’d befriended since 1982. Stadium security guards, chain crews, ball boys, radio play-by-play announcers, equipment managers, trainers…all of the unsung heroes who keep college football running, all so important that they always outlast the higher-profile head coaches.
Sam
He had such a great year that I kept expecting him to say, “Hey, man, you know what, I might be walking away too early…” But he had already made his big announcement, and everywhere he went, people were saying goodbye.
Dad
Oh, there were definitely a couple of times where I thought, Now, wait. Am I doing the right thing here? But I was getting letters of congratulations from coaches. There were some sports columns written about me that fall. The New York Times; Furman Bisher wrote story in the Atlanta Constitution Journal. I started receiving letters from coaches all over the country, guys like Al Groh and Grant Teaff, the former Baylor head coach who was president of the American Football Coaches Association, and the ACC commissioner, John Swofford.
They were all saying, “Good for you, Jerry, you are really going out the right way.”
Unfortunately, my plan had worked! The plan was too good. I couldn’t back out now.
The only addition that could have promoted the plan from good to perfect was one more great bowl game. The only assignment missing from Dad’s resume was the Sugar Bowl. He was in the San Antonio airport on business and chatting with a friend about wanting the Sugar Bowl when the phone rang from Doug Rhoads. He didn’t the get Sugar Bowl. He had the BCS National Championship Game.
Yeah, the plan was now perfect.
I called my editor at ESPN The Magazine. “I don’t know who you have assigned to cover the national title game and I don’t care. They aren’t going. I am. Also, I have a column idea of my own for the issue that comes out the week before: ‘A tribute to my father…’” They said yes.
The game itself had a futuristic feel, with Urban Meyer’s spread option offense versus an Oklahoma passing game that had averaged more than 50 points per game. These two teams playing for a national title meant that more and more teams around the nation would be leaning in to those types of offenses. This was a gateway game, a peek into the future and a testament to the single biggest change in the game that Dad had witnessed since his first Division I assignment more than 27 years earlier.
Dad
Speed, speed, and speed. The size of the players was obviously a big change, too. Now there were 300-pound linemen all over the field when we used to have maybe one. But even then, the more remarkable thing about those giants was how athletic they were, how fast they were.
When we were watching film and getting ready for that game, I thought about that evolution a lot. When I started calling college games, you knew what was going to happen. Everybody was going to run the ball on first and second down, throw a pass on third down, and punt on fourth down. Nobody could punt the ball more than 35 yards. We kicked it off from the 40-yard line and nobody could kick to the end zone. We might see one field goal a month.
These guys were running 70 offensive plays per game, and some were running 90. And back in the day you had a few guys on the field as fast Rocket Ismail and James Jett. These two teams looked like they were full of them.
If you had come to me at James Madison versus Virginia in 1982 and told me this is where college football would be by the time I was done, I would have
thought you were nuts. What a gift to have witnessed that firsthand.
Amid all of that looking forward, there was also plenty of looking back. About two hours before kickoff, during the same pregame field walkthrough routine that had once created concerns about oak trees hanging the end zone and saplings-turned-first down markers, Dad called Coach Eutsler, now retired and living in rural South Carolina. They had the same conversation they always had when Dad inevitably checked in with his coach, from playing fields in South Bend and Happy Valley to Death Valley and Pasadena.
“Jerry,” the coach said when he picked up the phone. “Where are you?”
“Coach, I’m on the 50-yard line at the national championship game.”
“Well, shouldn’t you be getting ready?!”
“Coach, I’ve been getting ready for this game my entire life.”
He called Bill Booker. He wished he could have called Marshall Caddell, like he used to do, but Pa-Pa had been gone 10 years now. So, he called his brother and my brother to see if they were at the stadium yet.
Sam
I was so busy. I had a big legal conference in Raleigh the morning after the game, but there was no way I was missing this. I flew in late the afternoon of the game and I was scheduled to blow out of there at like 5:00 the morning after.
I think back now, and I was very nostalgic on the flight down and the flight back out, but not so much during the game. In the pregame, Danny and I got Dad’s attention, but once it kicked off, I was so excited to be watching a national championship game in person, I really just went into game mode, like I always did.
I was in the auxiliary press box, almost directly above where Sam and Danny were sitting. In addition to my column that ran in ESPN The Magazine prior to the game, I had volunteered to pen a behind-the-scenes piece with the officiating crew. That morning I’d showed up for their film session and team discussion, walking in unannounced and sitting beside Dad, just like I had done so many times before at so many different ages. Only, this time I had a reporter’s notebook and I was furiously scribbling down information that I could use in my story. I might have even had my laptop with me, hammering away at the keyboard as I snapped photos with my Blackberry.