I’ve been watching football for many years, and I’ve seen plenty of bad calls that changed the final
outcome of some of those games. However, I’ve never seen anything close to the blatant biased calls for Alabama that we all saw this past Saturday night.
I Have been so bothered by the ridiculousness, that I’ve tried to come up with some sort of explanation for what transpired. I can chalk up the officials making these horrendous calls to 5 different main reasons....
1. Refs are betting for or against one of the teams. As the popularity and $$ of sports betting have increased, so have the number of those betting.
2. Refs are being paid off by someone to ensure their team wins, or a rival team loses. It seems too simple and too crooked to believe but this is a very real possibility.
3. Refs all grew up playing sports, so they are all fans of certain teams and don’t like other rival teams. This causes them to have a secret agenda that very much influences their calls. If I was a Ref, I know I could not be honest in a TN game, no way.
4. Refs are nonpartial, just influenced by events that happen in that particular game, like a coach yelling at them, making them mad, doing a make-up call for a previous bad call, home crowd, etc. Some coaches are experts in “working” and manipulating the refs during the game.
5. SEC top bosses are telling the refs who to make the calls for, and the fix is on. This is one of the top conspiracy theories but it’s actually less believable bc it would probably leak out and it never has. However, it’s possible that some element of this exists somehow, like maybe just hiring refs who are known Bama fans, and placing certain bias refs in certain games to help ensure outcomes.
6. Refs are just horrible refs. This is also unlikely bc the top teams are getting most of the calls when it counts. Although it’s been like this for several years, it seems to be getting worse all the time.
I really believe that Referees need to be consistent and accountable, just like Pruitt said. So Referee Reform needs to be figured out and implemented, to help reduce this escalating problem in the SEC.