by Ryan McGee
Dad
We had a TV timeout and our crew was huddled up at midfield, trying to suck down some Gatorade and discuss what we’d seen so far before the teams came back out. We all agreed that this was getting pretty tense, and we talked about how it was a great crowd and a tight game. And then, I felt this tap on my leg…
I turned around and there is Sam. Right out in the middle of the field. The only people on the field were the crew of six officials and a 10-year old boy.
Sam says to me, “Hey, Dad. I just wanted you to know that I think you guys are doing a great job.”
I look at Courtney Mauzy and he is as pale as his hat. I just put my arm around Sam and walked him back over the sideline. “Stay right here, okay? It’ll be time to trade with Ryan again shortly.”
Sam
Yeah…I don’t remember that. And I usually remember everything. Maybe my brain has suppressed that memory because it knows I shouldn’t have done it!
When the fourth quarter started, I re-commandeered the credential and took up a position right at the front pylon at the goal line on the end of Scott Stadium I knew Virginia would be driving toward. UVA was down 14–10 and in the closing minutes of the game were indeed marching toward the end zone where I stood. With time ticking down, Barry Word took a pitch to the short side of the field…my side of the field…avoided a couple of UNC tacklers and dove for the front corner pylon…my front corner pylon. I snapped the shutter on the camera. Word kept on coming. I somehow sidestepped him and he flew past me as he crashed into the ground. I remember looking down to see No. 11 hit the artificial turf at my feet with a thud.
Then, everything looked and sounded like it was going through a blender.
A UNC defender, too late to hit Word, instead hit me. Camera equipment and my ballcap and little plastic film canisters and, I think, my nylon Velcro wallet, containing a few bucks and a Jim Rice baseball card, it all went flying everywhere. The turf looked like a yard sale. You can’t see the collision on TV. I’ve tried. I remember a couple of photographers leaning over to help me up, and they looked terrified. But I was not and popped right back up. The next morning my neck was a little sore, but in the moment I was running on pure adrenaline.
All I could think was, This is the coolest job in the history of the world. When I grow up, I have to figure out a way to get paid to do this for a living.
Up until that moment, what my father did on Saturday afternoons was always cool. But now, I understood how he felt about it on a whole new level. Everyone my age, we all still had years of sports remaining in our lives, so many games still ahead to put on a uniform and feel the energy that only comes with being on a field of play. For a teenager like me or a younger kid like Sam, we still had teams we would be members of, from middle school track and field to church league basketball to high school baseball. But for the overwhelming majority of us, reaching adulthood means also reaching the end of the line for competitive sports, being a part of a team, and the feelings that come with that. It’s sad. It all goes away too fast.
But Dad got to keep going. He got to share the playing field with friends, coaches, athletes, and legends from among every one of those groups. In an instant, as if Barry Word had jarred something lose in my brain, I saw that. And from that day forward, I never once looked at what officials did the same way. They really loved it.
Dad
That same season, I took the whole family with me over to a game we were calling at Wake Forest. It was the first time we all went, all four of us. When the game was over, the families who had come to the game were waiting on us outside the locker room. It was great. But it was also really early in that first full ACC season, when we still trying to figure out how this was all going to work with Hannah and the boys and our lives at home that seemed to be getting busier every single day.
On the ride home that night, Hannah said to me, “I have never seen you look happier than I did when I saw you out there today in that game with your friends. I will never have any question as to why you do this.”
It certainly wasn’t for the money. In case you were wondering, the going rate for officiating a game and then coming home to have everyone at church mad at you, no one at the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce wanting to speak to you, and having your 13-year old son de-cleated by a future NFL linebacker was $200, plus $50 for travel. When Dad received his first ACC check in ’82, he gave it to Mom. She used it to buy our first microwave.
A big part of the joy of the job for Dad was seeing new places, new players, and working with new officials from around the nation. In those days of six-man crews, a cross-conference matchup also meant a cross-conference lineup of officials. They called them split crews.
Dad
I loved working with split crews. Now, the traveling team brings officials from their conference, but back then we shared games. North Carolina used to play a big non-conference schedule. They played Auburn, Oklahoma, Kansas, so we’d work with guys from the SEC and Big 8. Maryland played what was an old-school Eastern football schedule. Outside of the ACC they had long rivalries with West Virginia, Syracuse, and Penn State. All of those teams were independent at the time, so they used a group of northeastern-based independent officials. They were really good. Years later, I worked with a lot of them after the formation of the Big East. Clemson played Georgia nearly every year, so we would split a crew with the SEC guys. Same when Georgia Tech would play Georgia and Auburn.
One weekend, Dad and backfield buddy Bill Booker traveled to Auburn for one of those ACC visits to The Plains. This was the Pat Dye/Bo Jackson Era of Auburn football, a sleeping giant that had finally awakened and, in the years following the death of Bear Bryant, had become the state of Alabama’s preeminent college football force. An excited Booker and McGee met their SEC coworkers at the hotel for their pregame meeting. But one of them was missing.
Dad
We are going over their SEC mechanics versus ours and they are giving us a heads-up on little things to watch for at Jordan–Hare Stadium. Finally, I said, “Hey, guys, I’d really feel a lot better about this if the back judge was here since we’re going to be sharing a whole half of the field together. What’s his name? Billy Teas?”
The SEC guys, they just kind of snickered and kept on with the meeting. Well, Billy Teas, he never showed up. We got dressed and went to the stadium, and still no Billy Teas. We’re like an hour from kickoff. I’m thinking this is going to be a situation like those guys from Alabama who showed up at the last second for the game at Samford versus Guilford. But this is Auburn!
Booker and I decided to go walk the field. We get out there and there’s a guy leaning up against the goal post, like Bear Bryant used to do. He was a little short guy with a big belly, smoking a cigarette. And he had on an official’s uniform. I said to Booker, “Look at this damn guy. He put on a referee costume to get into the stadium for free.”
The SEC guys walked out behind us, and the Auburn coaches are out there, and everyone’s going, “Well, hey, Billy!” It was Billy Teas! And hey, man, Billy Teas, he ain’t got time for meetings or getting the game balls, or any of that. Billy Teas, he only works when the game starts.
He called a nice game. Then, when it was over, the six of us got in the van to go back to the hotel, but not Billy Teas. I never saw him again.
Aside from the occasional back judge skipping the pregame to burn a pack of Marlboro Reds, the age of the split crews was a model of cooperation and learning fresh takes on the football officiating craft. No matter what conference or region the crews came from, nearly 100 percent worked hard, worked together, and officiated every play of every game in the fairest manner possible.
Note: that’s nearly 100 percent.
In the days before this current era of Power 5 super conferences, the eastern half of the college football map was covered with independent schools, really good programs with no conference affiliation. In th
e north, the independents included Notre Dame, Penn State, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Boston College. In the south, the list included the likes of Miami, Florida State, Virginia Tech, and South Carolina, which had bolted from the ACC in 1971, citing the unfair politics and power of the Tobacco Road basketball schools.
Those regional groups of independents also had their own rosters of football officials. The overwhelming majority of those officials operated on the up-and-up. When conference realignment re-sorted the college football landscape at the end of the decade, those former independent officials went on to have great careers in the ACC, SEC, Big East, and elsewhere. Some of the biggest games Dad ever worked were alongside officials who came from those independent ranks, and they remain his great friends to this day.
But scattered among that long list of great officials and people were a couple of bad ones.
When Dad speaks of the moment that he realized that there were conspirators in his midst, his tone is that of a man who still can’t believe what he knows to have been true.
Dad
Clemson–South Carolina is a vicious rivalry. I worked that game five times. The first time, I was scheduled for Duke–North Carolina, but the ACC supervisor called and said they needed me down at Clemson. It was a split crew with some of the independent guys. He said, “I need you there because I think we’ve got real problems in this game. They’ve got one guy on that crew who has a questionable reputation, and they have another guy in there who we all know cheats.”
That game always has the most intense atmosphere anyway, but as soon as we hit the field, there’s Danny Ford, all lathered up before we’ve even kicked off. He was pointing across the field at one of the guys in particular. “Everyone in this stadium knows that S.O.B. cheats! Y’all don’t let him screw us!”
Now, never in 400 games did I even once time think that a coach was trying to get me to make a call to help him. But coaches are, by nature, paranoid about somebody screwing them. Danny Ford wasn’t saying to me, “I want you to look after me.” What he was saying, knowing that we already had our concerns, was, “Don’t let him be the guy that takes this game from us.”
Around that same time, very early in Dad’s career, a coach had summed it up when he spoke of split crews: “I think all referees are sumbitches. But at least with the ACC guys I know they’re our sumbitches.”
Dad
Here I am at one of the biggest games I’ve worked and I just can’t believe this is even happening, you know? But the way the system was set up then, I suppose there was always going to be someone, even if was just one or two guys, who were going to try and pull something over.
The system he is referring to how bowl assignments used to be determined for college football officials. Back then, there were only 18 postseason bowl games. The number of officiating crews from each conference who received a postseason invitation was based on the number of schools from that conference that made it into those bowl games, a half-crew per team.
For example, in 1984, the Big Ten had five teams earn bowl bids. That meant that the Big Ten had also earned the honor of sending two and half of its officiating crews to bowl games—15 men total—to some combination of the 13 postseason games that didn’t have a Big Ten team on the field.
These two independent officials standing across the field from Dad that night at Clemson had become notorious for trying to help their teams win games late in the season, when they were within a striking distance of a win total that would earn them a postseason bowl bid, and in turn possibly them, too. A win over Clemson would earn the Gamecocks a New Years’ Day bowl. They won by one point.
Dad is confident that his two questionable crewmates failed to determine the outcome of the game, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The following night, Dad and his ACC cohorts from the game received a call from the league office. Had they seen anything fishy? Yes, they said, they had. The two suspects had tried to cheat a yard here or there on multiple spots and there was at least one phantom foul on a big play.
There were no makeup calls made by the four good guys. That would be as dishonest as the original crimes. There were disagreements and “moving spots” were corrected by the other members of the crew when they needed to be fixed.
Dad
What drove you crazy was you had to work a game with these questionable guys, and then the holidays come along and two good officials are sitting at home, watching the Cotton Bowl or the Sugar Bowl, and there are those jerks on the field.
The very next season I had Miami and Maryland at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. The defending national champions versus another top 20 team. Split crew. Another game with a couple of guys we didn’t trust. We’re sitting in the Orioles dugout. That was our locker room there. One of them says to me, “Jerry, what’s the penalty for an offensive facemask?” I told him it was 15 yards, but I also said I didn’t know if I’d ever even seen one called before, at any level. Sure enough, Maryland had a long offensive play, and boom, offensive facemask. We’re live on CBS, a one-score game, and we’re looking at him like, Are you serious?!
All you could do was fix everything you could catch as it happened during the game and let those guys know you knew what was happening and you weren’t putting up with it.
Only once did it boil over into a real fight. It was at halftime of another Clemson–South Carolina game. A touchdown had been called back, and the umpire, an ACC guy, was waiting in the locker room, shouting, “You are going to let the kids on the field decide this game!” The two officials had to be separated.
Dad
I was thinking, how are we going to call the second half if we were missing two officials?
In the end, you report it to your supervisor and hope maybe someone will do something about it. Back then, it was more of the Wild Wild West when it came to how officiating was governed. Today, that wouldn’t even last a game.
Once realignment took place, the era of the independents ended and the governance of officiating fell under a much more deliberate set of national checks and balances. It also helped when television became widespread and there was nowhere for the small handful of cheaters in stripes to hide. And once the men who’d had to share the field with those rules-benders moved into the roles of league and national officiating supervisors, the game’s small handful of shady characters went the way of the leather helmet. Split crews also went away, to the chagrin of many officials who enjoyed working with out-of-conference colleagues, and the visiting conference began providing the crews for cross-conference games. The archaic “bowl bids equals bowl assignments” model was also scrapped. Today, the 40-plus bowl games are distributed evenly between the Power 5 (five bowls each) and Group of 5 (three each) conference officiating groups, as assigned by the national college football officiating coordinator.
The coincidental twist in all of this is that at season’s end, Dad received his first bowl assignment, and it was also South Carolina’s bowl assignment. The No. 7 Gamecocks took on No. 9 Oklahoma State and running back Thurman Thomas in the 1984 Gator Bowl.
His next game was even bigger, the season opener at Maryland, ranked preseason No. 1 by Sport Magazine, but which lost to a Penn State team that would play in the next national title game. For Dad, the year ended with his second bowl game, a showdown between the ’84 national champs, BYU, and Ohio State.
Sam
We didn’t go to Dad’s first bowl game, but we went to the second one. It was the Citrus Bowl, and we did it all. We went to Disney World. I remember it was awesome because you had all of these fans from all of the Florida New Year’s bowl games at Disney World, cheering and giving each other a hard time.
We went to Kennedy Space Center. The Challenger was actually on the launch pad, a month before the explosion. Ryan had just been to Space Camp, so that was a really big deal, and after the accident, we watched that explosion over and over again, trying to fig
ure out what happened. It was the second-most watched piece of video ever recorded at our house.
The most-watched was recorded at nearly the same time. Dad had a touchdown call in that game. Robbie Bosco, the BYU quarterback, had scrambled to the far side of the field, and then he threw back across the field, nearly all the way to the other sideline, like a 40-yard bomb. It was a totally busted play, so the receiver had come back into the middle of the field, caught it, and then turned and kind of dived toward the front pylon with the defender right behind him.
The way the mechanics were then, Dad was so tight up on the players all the time and the play had moved so far to other side of the field, the receiver and the defensive back got behind him, between him and goal line. That would never happen now.
So, Dad was running up the sideline behind the receiver when he was headed for the pylon, the defender was between them. He got into the end zone, but there was some question about whether or not his foot had stepped out of bounds before the ball broke the plane.
It happened all at once. Dad signaled touchdown. But he was convinced he’d missed it.
I don’t know if anyone has ever driven from Orlando to Raleigh faster than we did after the game. As soon as we hit the door of our house, we were rewinding the tape on that play. We watched it a hundred times. This is 1985. There’s no goal line camera or pylon cam. Just two angles, both blurry on the replay.
The whole time, Dad is saying, “I think he stepped out of bounds.” And the whole time, I’m saying, “Nope. You got it right. Touchdown.”
We still don’t agree on it.
I sincerely hope that every family has a stretch in their lives together like we had in the 1980s. I remember it as pure joy, and football was such a huge part of that.
