PHOENIX — The NFL is setting in motion plans to begin hiring and training replacement game officials as early as May if it is unable to reach an agreement on a new labor deal with the referees’ union, two people familiar with the league’s plans told The Athletic on Sunday.
The current collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the NFL Referees Association — a six-year pact hammered out in 2019 — expires May 31. And with the two sides still far apart in negotiations, members of NFL leadership have begun identifying and recruiting potential replacement game officials, the people familiar with the plans said. The referees drawing consideration from the NFL currently work in the NCAA Division I, Division II and Division III ranks.
Determined to avoid the time crunch that the league found itself in when having to hastily prepare replacement referees for action during a work stoppage in 2012, the NFL would begin making those hires in advance of the current CBA expiration and training would commence soon after. The goal is for those replacement officials — who would number somewhere from 150 to 180 — to spend the bulk of the summer going through training and then be placed on the field during training camp practice sessions to acclimate themselves to the speed of the NFL game rather than jumping into officiating during preseason games.
There are several key sticking points in negotiations, issues on which the NFL and NFLRA strongly disagree. Those fundamental differences in opinion led to a breaking off of negotiations last week and have created a bleak prospect for an agreement in advance of the May 31 expiration date.
Concerned by some of the ongoing inconsistencies in the quality of officiating, NFL officials want the new labor deal with the referees to include parameters that will ensure greater accountability for officials. The NFL wants to require poor-performing game officials to go through additional training during the offseason. Some of that training would also include a mandate that those struggling officials then fulfill assignments to officiate United Football League games to help sharpen their skills.
Leaders of the NFLRA have resisted such a proposal, the sources said, but NFL officials see such an arrangement as a logical path to improvement.
“There’s some resistance to being able to force or require the poor performing game officials to be able to use some of the tools that (the league offers) … to be able to make game officials better,” explained one of the people familiar with the deliberations. “The best way to do that, and the only reliable way to do that, is to have them on the field and make these decisions in real time.”
Meanwhile, the two sources said the NFLRA wanted the NFL to use a seniority-based system to determine postseason assignments, rather than selecting playoff officiating teams based on performance regardless of experience.
The NFLRA didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. Last week, NFLRA executive director Scott Green said in a statement that talks broke down when an NFLRA counteroffer was rejected and the referees’ association later learned that no one in the NFL delegation at the meeting was authorized to negotiate beyond their original proposal.
“The NFLRA will continue to bring its dealmakers to the table to secure a CBA that is fair, recognizes the key role that NFL officials play in the league’s success, and provides both sides with the long-term certainty that management, officials, coaches, players and fans deserve,” Green said in the statement last week.
Compensation also ranks among the divides between the two sides.
Two people familiar with the NFL’s offer said that it included an annual salary increase of 6.45 percent per year for the next six years. That would represent an increase over the current deal’s 5.75 percent annual increase. (The CBA that ran from 2012 to 2018 featured pay increases of 5.2 percent per year.) The individuals said that the referees union — citing the NFL’s massive annual revenue stream — sought an annual increase of more than 10 percent.
The NFL strongly opposed such a figure, arguing that such an increase would double the annual rate of player salary hikes. The NFL pays referees $350,000 per season on average, including base pay, bonuses and other benefits.
The NFLRA has drawn comparisons between its salaries and those of MLB umpires and NBA referees, according to the people familiar with the negotiations, and has argued that its officials should receive compensation that rivals that of its counterparts in other leagues. The NFL’s negotiators, however, argued that NFL game officials are part-time employees and that their game-by-game salaries dwarf what baseball umpires make.
Referees have said they would prefer to remain part-time employees, according to the people familiar with the negotiations, because 90 percent of them have other jobs. The NFL has, however, proposed to make the officiating chief of each crew a full-time employee. Part of the requirement of those full-time positions would involve reporting to league headquarters each Tuesday during the season to go over film and then relay areas of needed correction or improvement to their crew members.
One of the sources described the NFLRA leaders as “staunchly opposed” to the idea of making officials full-time employees.
NFL brass doesn’t hold much optimism that the sides will manage to work out their differences in time to avoid a lockout. And after learning from the struggles of replacement officials in 2012, when they worked the first three weeks of the regular season amid a storm of controversies, NFL leaders believe it is imperative that they begin the hiring and training process as soon as possible.
The league has told the referees’ union that once it has to start hiring replacement referees, awarding them signing bonuses and also committing finances to training them, the prospect of continued negotiations with the union will be more difficult, the sources said.
The NFL issued a memo to teams on Friday, telling them not to publicly comment on the CBA negotiations with officials.