Subscribe
Follow Us
The NFL officiating rage that began with Mike Pereira has now exploded to the extremely disappointing detriment of the league. The best on-field officials are retiring early to take cushy studio jobs.
The latest to bite this very specific dust is the great Gene Steratore.
The National Football League announced the news on Saturday just before reports about Steratore taking that comfortable job with CBS Sports as a rule analyst hit the wire, as first reported by Cameron Filipe of Football Zebras.
Steratore, 55, is widely considered the best official in the game. He was chosen to officiate Super Bowl 52, allowing his NFL on-field career to go out on the very top just like John Elway.
The aforementioned Pereira started this trend. When he jumped that NFL ship and on to the broadcast team of FOX Sports, others such as Mike Carey and Ed Hochuli have followed—further declining on-field performance as a whole.
Never has the replay system been so far out of whack as it's been this past season. Instead of simply overturning only the plays with “indisputable evidence,” the league started to actually look to officiate the debated plays as it was happening in real-time. That's on Ron Rivera, a post that would have been severely influenced by Pereira during his pre-FOX days.
Steratore is now the fourth referee to retire since the end of the 2017 season. That's an incredible number the league will be forced to deal with immediately. Two of the others are Jeff Triplette, who is set to join the Monday Night Football team on ESPN, and Terry McAulay, whose skills have linked him to NBC.
And let's not forget about Dean Blandino as well. He, too, just like Pereira, works at FOX (as both previously holding down the NFL head of officiating.
