by Ryan McGee
Dad
A few years after I had retired as an official, I was working as president at Wingate University when my phone rang. It was Eric Mele, who had been an assistant at Wingate, but was now the running backs coach at Washington State. He said, “Hey Doc, I’ve got someone here with a rules question for you…” The next voice I heard was pretty unmistakable. It was Mike Leach. He’s the Air Raid guru, so he’s always trying to figure out how to get as many players downfield as potential receivers he possibly can. He was wondering about a play he thought might take advantage of some grey area in the rulebook. I can’t remember exactly what he asked, but it involved a bizarre snap and, basically, he was trying to find a way to hide one of his receivers on the field. I do remember that it was pretty genius. But it was also 100 percent illegal.
So, here was Mike Leach, a coach I had never met in my life, calling me, a retired field judge, about a cockamamie play he was drawing up in the middle of May, five months since he’d coached his last game and four months before his next one. And what’s he doing? Looking for any competitive edge he can find.
It brings to mind another Danny Ford-ism: “All I want is a fair advantage.”
Throughout Dad’s officiating career, he never saw anyone overtly trying to cheat. Well, nothing super blatant, anyway. Let’s just say the 2015 Deflategate controversy involving Tom Brady and the New England Patriots wasn’t exactly an original idea. Among the long list of a college officiating crew’s pregame duties is to inspect the bags of game balls each team will use in that day’s contest. Growing up, on those occasions when my brother and I were allowed in the officials’ locker room before games, we’d walk in to find everyone sitting on benches rubbing and squeezing footballs like they were searching for the freshest cantaloupes in the supermarket produce section. Balls that passed the psi test (a number that has moved up and down as the years have gone by) were sent back to the teams. But when equipment managers started getting too antsy about getting those balls back as early as possible, officials started noticing a lot of varying shapes and sizes of those balls when they reappeared after kickoff. So, they stopped giving the post-inspection footballs back to the teams until as close to game time as possible.
Dad
I always admired the people who cared enough to try and get an edge. They weren’t cheating. They were playing the game all-out, all the time. When Bobby Bowden was the head coach at Florida State, they would rack up personal fouls for late hits, but he would argue to us that those hits were at the whistle, not after it. He’d tell me, “Jerry, we coach our guys to play to the end of the whistle.” They weren’t trying to break the rules. They were trying to get every inch they could within those rules.
The greatest teams I saw a lot, like those Florida State teams, or Miami, or Clemson, would even try to gain an inch in how they lined up. When Tommy Tuberville was coaching those great defensive units at Miami in the late 1980s and early ’90s, he told me that their goal was to reestablish the line of scrimmage back two yards on every single play. So, before the play their guys would crowd the line of scrimmage as far as they could. If they got flagged, then from there on it was, “Okay, this is where the line is.”
The really great teams look for those lines everywhere. You go back and look at the teams I officiated that won championships, and they were usually also the teams that led the league in penalties. The teams who lost games they shouldn’t have, they had a lot of fouls of complacency, just being sloppy. The teams that won those games had a lot of fouls of aggression and creativity. And that creativity isn’t limited to those 60 minutes on the game clock.
A coach walked up to me during pregame and said, “Jerry, I’m so glad you’re here today. Look at that right cornerback for those guys. He’s good. But he holds all the time, but I know you’ll get it.” I’m not going to call that kid for holding just because a coach told me to. It isn’t going to sway my judgment during a game. But in that coach’s mind, he’s just earned an advantage. It makes him feel good. That’s a competitor who never stops. Like Danny Ford letting me know he knew where I worked the weekend before. I know how he knew. He had a guy on his sideline who’d seen me at Catawba. But that’s homework. That’s someone looking for an edge.
That’s the mentality behind those nice lockers, fruit baskets, and personalized orange nameplates. Someone in Clemson’s athletic department was thinking, You know, just maybe, if these guys know how well we take care of them down here at Death Valley, it’ll help us out when the time comes. Did Dad ever pause before throwing his flag against Clemson and think, I’m not going to call pass interference here today because, man, that fried chicken they gave us after the Duke game was so freaking delicious? Of course not. But that didn’t mean teams and coaches wouldn’t keep trying, just in case.
The most memorable case of homework thoroughly done came in what was then the biggest game Dad had worked, the 1990 Orange Bowl between top-ranked Colorado and fourth-ranked Notre Dame. (No, not the one with the Rocket Ismail punt return touchdown that was called back; this was the year before that.) During pregame warmups, Notre Dame head coach Lou Holtz casually walked up to Dad on the sideline. The two had never met, but Holtz threw his arm around the field judge’s shoulders like they were old pals and said, “Dr. McGee, how’s everything at Furman?” By that time, Dad was in his third year as the VP of Development at Furman University. Then Holtz turned Dad away from the field and pointed into the grandstands of the old Orange Bowl Stadium. “Are Hannah and the boys here? Where are they sitting?”
When the crew gathered in the locker room later, Dad shared his story, and Booker said Holtz had done the same with him, asking about the goings-on in the Lynchburg Public Schools. Everyone on the crew had the same story. Holtz had researched them all, memorized the facts, and casually walked the pregame sidelines to have seven separate how in the world did he know that?! conversations with every official in the game.
But back in ’82, Dad was still a long way from the Orange Bowl. He was still a rookie in the orange-filled bowl of Death Valley. Three weeks after the Duke game, he was back at Clemson, this time for a visit from the North Carolina Tar Heels. UNC was ranked 18th and Clemson was 13th. The ACC title was on the line. The game was a total slugfest. Dad’s third-ever Division I game, second-ever ACC game, second-ever game at Clemson, and first game between a pair of ranked teams.
And he was afraid he might’ve screwed the whole thing up.
Dad
I have all the faith in the world in my ability to make calls. I have always believed in my judgment. So, my only concern, just like with Emory & Henry at Guilford 10 years earlier, was just not to do something dumb.
I was at back judge, way downfield from the line of scrimmage. This was a brutal game. It was tied late 13–13. Clemson had the ball and it was driving. I was behind the North Carolina defense. Back then, the only person who counted players on defense was the back judge. That was me. Today, everyone on that end of the field, back judge, side judge, and field judge, all count and check with each other to see that we all are in agreement. At the end of my career, I had counted the defense so many times, 160 times per game for 40 years, that I really could sense when there were 12 men on the field even before I counted—like, “Man, there are too many people out here!” But back then I was a long ways from having any kind of sixth sense. And back then the only person counting was me.
I counted…1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11…and 12. Damn. I counted again. And again. I think I counted seven times. As soon as the ball was snapped, I threw my flag. Instead of running into the middle of the field to report to the referee, I ran straight toward the sideline to get between Carolina’s bench and the field. And the whole time I’m counting again, slow this time. 1…2…3…as deliberately I could do it. But there were definitely 12 out there. As I was explaining it to the referee, a North Carolina guy realized what he’d done and started slinking off. I stopped him and sai
d, “Nope. I need you to stay right there.”
My heart was pounding, man. I’m thinking, If I am wrong here, this will be the shortest tenure in the history of Atlantic Coast Conference officiating. But I wasn’t wrong. The game ended with four straight North Carolina passes into the end zone to try and win it. And I was the only official back there, all those passes coming right at me. Damn baptism by fire. I knew if I could handle that game in that situation, I think I could handle about anything after that.
Those would-be game-winning passes were thrown right at Dad, but also right at his dad. Marshall “Pa-Pa” Caddell and my uncle Danny were both there that day, having driven in from Rockingham to take their seat at the 10-yard line, so low in the grandstand that they were nearly on the field.
It meant so much to Dad that they were there. It was a great feeling, but an unfamiliar one. He had so many fantastic father figures in his life, such a great family, but rarely did any of them make it to his games. Coach Eutsler from Rockingham had his own games to coach. Mr. Gaddy and all the boys back in Rockingham had their own games to officiate. But Pa-Pa and Uncle Danny were there on this day, the first of so many games that they would both attend. My father being watched by his father and brother, often with me and my brother sitting alongside, and so many times right there at Clemson.
That day in ’82 they had been nervous wrecks watching Dad battle through so many crucial situations in his first real big-time game. That night, they waited for him on the road back into North Carolina to meet for dinner. Uncle Danny asked about something he had noticed during the game, especially during that last frantic series of UNC would-be game-winning passes. He’d seen Dad lined up in the back of the end zone, looking up into the sky and talking to no one in particular. What was he doing?
Dad
I said to him, “I was praying, fool!”
After all, this wasn’t f--king Catawba.
Timeout on the Field Red Carpet with Mike Leach and Gardner Minshew
“Minshew, come here! This is the guy whose Dad told us we couldn’t run that play like we wanted to.”
It is Thursday night, December 6, 2018, at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta. I am working as a red-carpet reporter for the 2018 College Football Awards on ESPN. Washington State head coach Mike Leach has me by the arm and is calling out to his quarterback, Gardner Minshew, there as a finalist for the Davey O’Brien Award given to the nation’s best college quarterback.
Leach and Minshew are a comedy team akin to Laurel and Hardy, complete with one goofy mustache. Both men are equipped with a quirkiness that is very much suited for the offense they ran together in Pullman, the imagination-fueled Air Raid.
“No, really,” the coach continues, “I was working up some goofy stuff with Coach Mele and we’re like, there’s no way this is legal, but every official in Pac-12 hates me, so who are we going to call? Mele said, ‘I’ve got a guy and he was a ref forever and he’s also a doctor.’ I’m thinking, hey, a doctor, this guy is smart. But then Mele says he’s also a college president, so now I’m thinking maybe he isn’t so smart. College president feels like the hardest job in the world to me, dealing with all of these people who always need something from you, but then they also all think they can do their job better than you can. So, then I think, well, actually, that sounds a lot like being a college football coach, so let’s hear what this referee college president guy has to say.”
Minshew looks at me with an expression that says, “Sorry about this, man.”
I wink as if to say, “No sweat,” and then I add, “Also, Dad went to East Carolina.”
The future Jacksonville Jaguars starting quarterback says, “Hey, so did I before I went to Washington State!”
I want to say, “Yes, Gardner Minshew, I know; that’s why I told you that.” But there’s no time. Leach is rolling. He never stopped, even as I was talking to his player.
“So, the play I was asking your dad about, if I remember correctly, was Big Gulp Left, this swinging gate idea, like you sometimes see on special teams, but we wanted to run it out in the open field. Basically, everyone is set up way to the short side of the field, and it looks like a normal formation, but the center doesn’t have the ball. The snap is coming from a wide receiver, and he sends it way back over to the quarterback…”
“But,” Minshew interrupts, “It doesn’t come to me. It goes to the running back lined up next to me. And it also doesn’t go to the guy in motion, who just ran behind the snapper. The snapper fakes it to him before snapping it way over to us. Cool, right?”
“So, anyway,” Leach interrupts back, pulling on my arm again, “We called this guy’s dad to ask if we could run that. We knew we could run it. Oregon had run it several years on an extra point. So, what we were calling about…?”
Pause. Awkward silence. Leach stares at the red carpet. Minshew points into the air to tell me to hang on. It’s clear that he’s been in this situation before. A lot. Suddenly, Leach re-fires.
“Yeah, we wanted to know who is still eligible to catch the ball on that play. I’ve got a wide receiver who is snapping it, and usually on that play that is the guy teams will immediately throw it back to, slipping into an open space after he snaps it. But this also means I have a center who is not really a center. So, can we turn that center into a receiver? Have him slip out there, too?”
Minshew cocks one eyebrow. “We used that formation in two games this year, against Wyoming and Oregon, but we never tried to throw it. Certainly not the center. We ran the ball.”
Leach: “We didn’t try to throw it to him because this guy’s dad said we couldn’t.”
Finally, I get a word in: “Well, did it work when you ran the ball out of that formation?”
Minshew: “Every time. Maybe we should have tried to throw it to the center.”
Leach, after another pause: “Maybe we still will. I haven’t asked any Pac-12 officials what they think. But they might not be smart enough to know. I don’t think there are any college presidents in that group.”
5. ACC-elerating
During the offseason between ’82 and ’83, Dad received a call from Mr. Neve. One of his veteran ACC field judges, Gerry Austin, was moving to the NFL. Dad was thrilled for Austin. He knew the pros was where Austin wanted to be, and now we know Austin’s NFL tenure certainly backed that up, with a stack of Super Bowl appearances.
Neve asked Dad if he had enjoyed his brief time at back judge. Dad confessed that it had taken some adjustment to a new point of view, with the game coming directly at him, but yes, he liked it. Neve replied in his trademark terse tone, “Well, I was going to ask if you’d like to have Gerry Austin’s spot at field judge, but if you like back judge that much, you can stay there.”
Dad said, “Mr. Neve, you know what? Just this morning as I was driving to work, I was thinking to myself, ‘Man, I sure would love to move to field judge.’”
Mr. Neve laughed aloud. That didn’t happen a lot. It was like squeezing orange juice out of iron.
Dad
Of all the things I was fortunate enough to accomplish as an official, making Mr. Neve laugh might have been the greatest.
Dad worked a full ACC schedule in 1983. The crew was an All-Pro squad, including referee Courtney Mauzy, in his eighth year with the conference; back judge Doug Rhoads, an FBI agent who loved officiating so much he did it for free (the FBI didn’t allow second paying jobs); Bud Elliott; Rex Stuart; and Don Robertson, who was in such ridiculously great physical condition he would officiate games on Saturday afternoons and enter marathons on Sunday mornings.
Dad
These guys were unflappable. They were also helpful. There was no jealousy with this group. Instead of holding the new guy at arm’s length, they took me in and taught me. That’s what the good guys do. That’s what Mr. Gaddy and Mr. Clary had done. If you make me better, then that means I can make you better.
He and Mom talked about what that would mean on the home front. Once again, she pledged her support, but she also confessed some concern over the amount of autumn weekend nights Dad might be on the road. Even for the drivable Tobacco Road games, a Friday night stay was mandatory for any game that kicked off before 6:00 pm, which was most of them. The fly-in games meant at least one night, usually two. Dad pledged to be back home as soon as possible every Sunday morning, and looking back, I don’t think he ever missed church, even if it meant showing up in the middle of the sermon, having come straight from the airport.
A lot of those Sunday mornings, he found himself preached at, but not by the pastor. It was unsolicited feedback from the many fans of the Triangle area football teams, wanting to know why his crew had thrown that flag against North Carolina or didn’t throw the flag on that obvious late penalty against Duke. They would even have complaints about calls that happened in all of the ACC games he hadn’t worked.
Dad
People would be just adamant that I wasn’t doing my duty as a true North Carolinian. “How in the world could you call that pass interference against the Tar Heels yesterday?! It cost them the game, Jerry…and you are from here!”
This went on for my entire career. In 1998, I had a game at North Carolina, and their All-American defensive back Dre Bly had intercepted a pass that set the ACC career interceptions record. The crowd went crazy and they made an announcement in the stadium; everyone was roaring. But I had a flag on the play. Defensive pass interference. If you know me, it has to be pretty egregious for me call it. My rule was that if I was going to throw my flag for a P.I. then I was going to have to throw it into a pool of blood.
I loved watching Dre Bly play football. But it was definitely a foul.
