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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThey were cops, teachers, investment advisers, a supermarket manager, even the director of a local parks-and-recreation department. They had officiated all over America, from the desolate high school fields of godforsaken Texas towns to D-1 college-football coliseums. They had dreamed of working in the NFL, but for one reason or another it just never happened for them. So when a mass e-mail went out last spring\u2014Help Wanted: Refs\u2014they jumped at the chance.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nWayne Elliott,\u00A055, referee; Realtor and\u00A0__NCAA Division III official, Austin: I received an e-mail in late April saying it looked possible that the officials might be locked out. I e-mailed the NFL recruiting office, and not two days later I got an application. Then I received like a six-page contract: \"If you pass our background check, if you pass a physical, and if you come to spend three days in Dallas at this clinic, we will pay you X amount of money\"\u2014a signing bonus, basically.\u00A0\n\nToney Brasuell, 49, head linesman; investment adviser and NCAA Division I official, Benton, Arkansas: There were two mini-clinics, one in Atlanta and one in Dallas.\n\nBruce Hermansen,\u00A068, referee; retired technology ecutive and retired NCAA Division I and II official, Aptos, California: We were mentored by various people, from NFL security all the way up to the vice president of officiating for the league. These were crash courses; we had about a month to get ready. They're taking you through actual game footage. It was totally consuming for four days.\n\nDwayne Strozier, 55, side judge; onetime supermarket manager, ex-USFL player, and former junior-college official, L.A.: Basically, they're teaching you how they want their game called. In the pros, you let things go that you wouldn't in college.\n\nHermansen: They put us through about four hours of agility ercises, which I think was their way of weeding people out.\n\nElliott: Some guys would fall on their back running backwards. They were just very clumsy, unathletic-looking people.\n\nBrasuell: You had to do a half-mile run, which is just not that far, but some guys really struggled.\n\nPerry Hudspeth, 64, line judge; investment adviser and retired NCAA Division I official, Winston-Salem, North Carolina: I wondered if most of the regular officials could even pass that test.\n\nElliott: There were like twenty people in the referee breakout meetings, and I knew most of 'em. I'm looking at my competition and thinking, I'm gonna be the man! I suppose they made their cuts from the r\u00E9sum\u00E9s and just watching to see how you move, because there's nothing we did there that they could see what kind of an official we were. They only cut fifteen people from those two clinics.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Replacement Richard Nicks reviews a play in Baltimore.\n\nHudspeth: Once you were selected, they brought everyone back to Dallas for two and a half days. \n\nElliott: They had all these terms I had never even heard before:\u00A0double-with and double-after... You read these plays in the casebook: When is that\u00A0ever gonna happen? But when did a simultaneous catch on the last play of the game ever happen?\n\nMike Peek,\u00A0_62, head linesman; junior-\n\n college economics teacher and retired NCAA\u00A0Division I official, Athens, Texas_: The preseason was an audition.\n\nElliott: They definitely cut the weakest officials. In one preseason game, there was a pretty obvious fumble, but [the official] called the guy down. It was challenged and reversed, and he was cut a couple\u00A0\n\n of days after that and became an alternate. Another guy, a line judge, had trouble spotting the ball. He'd be off a yard quite often.\n\nHermansen: The preseason was very low-key, but it served its purpose: Here's what it's gonna feel like when you walk on the field for real. Was it a tough situation to succeed in, given the amount of time we had to prepare? Yes, it was. We had a lot of support from the NFL, but they knew from the get-go that we were in a no-win situation.\n\nElliott: I was in Chicago [for week one], and first off I thought, \"This is\u00A0loud. And way more intense.\" The guy sang the greatest national anthem I've ever heard in my life. It was surreal. This is the Bears and Colts and Sunday football, and I'm not watching it on my TV\u2014I'm here.\n\nPeek: Here goes a B-52 flying over. The crowd noise was so loud I couldn't even communicate with the guy standing one foot away from me.\n\nBrasuell: If you'd told me this time last year that I would be getting to do a Monday Night Football\u00A0game, the odds were just slim to none; it wasn't working out that way, and I had accepted that. I'd taken a leave of absence from officiating so I could watch my older son play Friday-night football. I'm not going to miss his ball games. But Monday night in Baltimore? Yes, sir. That was my Super Bowl.\n\nHermansen: Week one was a totally\u00A0different ball game. The players were going full speed.\n\nPeek: I've seen a lot of speculation that it was so much faster, but it's like driving down the highway: You need more focus at seventy than at fifty-five, but it's an interchangeable situation. In football officiating,\u00A0there's a whole lot of just plain old instinct. If a guy's been calling for forty years, if he's in the right position with instincts and experience, all that's going to take over and you're going to get the calls right.\u00A0\n\nHermansen: In each of the first two weeks, there was a lot of pushing and shoving that caused us to have to get in and break it up. I started to think to myself, I don't recall seeing this through the years in the NFL. I got the impression that this was intentional, to test these rookies out here. I'm convinced that was the case. I think the NFL was convinced, too, because they actually put the word out after week two to knock it off.\n\nStrozier: I think a lot of coaches felt that they could bully the officials into making calls. In the week-two Monday-night game,\u00A0\u00A0[Denver defensive coordinator Jack] Del Rio and [head coach John] Fox got fined because they were a little more...special than what they should have been. I've been around this game since 1965, okay? This ain't my first barbecue.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n __\n\nIt's open season on the subs! Clockwise from top left, Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger, head coaches John Harbaugh (Ravens), John Fox (Broncos), and Bill Belichick (Patriots).\n\nPeek: Every mistake the replacement officials made was exaggerated by the media. There was one I saw on one of those blooper shows where the official turned and gave the signal to the wrong side of the field. I'm sure mistakes occurred in the games with the regular officials.\n\nHudspeth: Because we were rookies, we probably passed on some things that the regular guys called, because they feel more comfortable with it. We did better each game. We took a lot of abuse by the media, and it was unwarranted in some cases. It came to a crescendo in that last week.\n\nBrasuell: Washington against Cincinnati was week three. Washington was out of time-outs. The quarterback spiked the ball to stop the clock, and on the next play their tight end false-started. Then [Redskins offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan] was out on the field. I told him three times that he had to get off the field, and he burst out with some comments that resulted in his being flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct. I heard later on that he had chased us into the stadium tunnel. There are just some things that you do not do.\n\nHermansen: In the Ravens-Patriots game, there was the issue with the game-winning field goal. Afterward, the official was jogging toward the locker room, and Coach Belichick just reached out and grabbed his arm. If a field goal or extra point passes above the uprights, it cannot be reviewed. I don't know if Coach Belichick knew that or not.\u00A0\n\nElliott: At halftime of the Green Bay-Seattle game, I felt like the cock of the walk. I was thinking, We're kicking this game's butt. In the fourth quarter, Green Bay took their first lead of the game; it was 12 to 7. Seattle got the ball back with about a minute left. Then it was fourth-and-ten from the twenty-four. The quarterback rolled sixteen yards back. I'm watching him; he's my responsibility. I could tell from the reaction of the Seattle bench that we had a touchdown.\n\nHudspeth: One official was signaling time-out. When you have a close play and need a second or two to think about it, that's always a good signal to give. Then the side judge came in and immediately called it a touchdown. I think had they been more experienced, they would have talked to each other first.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n _The call that pretty much ended the NFL's lockout of the\n\nreal refs. The Packers defender appeared to intercept the\n\n pass, but the officials gave the TD\u2014and the game\u2014to the\n\n Seahawks._\n\nElliott: In the replay booth, you could definitely see the Green Bay guy controlling the ball first and the Seattle guy getting his arms in there, and it was an argument for a simultaneous catch. The replay guy said, \"We're gonna have to go with \u2018The play stands.' \" I never knew life could be the way it was for the next week. I got, I would guess, 2,000 calls and texts on my cell phone from Wisconsin: \"The best call you could make right now would be suicide.\"\n\nPeek: For probably three hours of that game, we had been doing a bang-up job, in my judgment. We wanted to bowl a 300 game. We got close to that 300 game, and then, in the last frame, we threw a gutter ball.\u00A0\n\nBrasuell: At San Francisco during halftime, when the security guys stepped out and faced the crowd, I said hi to one of them. He asked how I was doing, and I said I was thankful and blessed to be here, and he said, \"Amen to that.\" That had a huge impact on me. If the seven of us officials weren't doing this, this man is out of work. It was a lot bigger than football.\u00A0\n\nElliott: My Division III supervisor said he thought I did a good job and am I ready to do a college game on the thirteenth? This weekend, there's gonna be five of us replacement refs in the same game. Since 1991 we have been piling into a big white van on Saturday mornings, the same seven of us every weekend, and driving to the outer lands of Texas\u2014these little Podunk places that have these little schools\u2014and working these college games. They pay us $225 and no travel. We do it because we love it. We're like brothers. So we get to do it again next week.\u00A0\n\nStrozier: My plans were to be evaluated and try to really be a part of this. I know I'm temporary, I get that. Sometimes that's how you start, like an internship. Now they know whether or not you can handle it.\u00A0\n\nBrasuell: If they say they're going to bring some of us back\u2014which they did\u2014I think they will. I haven't heard anything yet, but I think they will."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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