Some interesting stuff here. Full time refs and refs getting sit down for poor performance.
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/82...placement-refs
NFL May Start Season With Replacement Refs
John Clayton on the NFL likely to start season with replacement referees.
League executives said Monday they now foresee starting the 2012 regular season with replacement officials.
At a time when players are openly criticizing replacement officials and coaches are privately grumbling about them, the NFL and NFL Referees Association are not making any progress towards a new deal, according to sources familiar with the talks.
Economics play a part in the stalemate, but league brass said there are two other issues hanging over and hanging up negotiations.
For starters, the NFL wants to make a group of officials, who work only part time for the NFL, work full time. But more than 90 percent of those officials already have full-time jobs and they are unwilling to leave them and the revenue they provide.
The other issue is that the NFL wants to add three additional crews to give officials more rest and the league more officiating options, but the locked-out officials oppose this. In an ideal world, the NFL would like a bigger pool of officials to choose from, especially with some of the top officials aging.
The league believes if it could bring in more officials now, it could groom more for the future.
The league also has discussed the option of
rotating some of the proposed new officials into established crews if the league determines there is a substandard performance by an official that merits a change.
The NFL is completing its first full preseason weekend with Monday night's Cowboys-Raiders game. It has assigned crews to this upcoming weekend's second week of preseason games. Plus, the assignments for the third week were sent out Monday, further proving that the league is planning to have this last into and through the preseason.
The league also believes that now that the replacement officials, who have been training with the league for the past three months, will be better suited to handle the pressure of the NFL with experience this past weekend. As one league executive in the officiating department said, just as teams are forced to start rookies in the preseason, the league is being forced to do the same, and just as teams' rookies often perform better as the preseason goes on, so will the officials.
One source familiar with the stalled negotiations estimated that the two sides would not resolve their differences until the third week of the regular season. His feelings on the state of the talks provide a snapshot of how far apart the two sides are.