OFFICIAL PARTNERSHIP
NFL-CFL Officiating Development Program helps referees on both sides learn from one another
Dave Foxcroft heard the roar of 78,000 fans as he joined the Denver Broncos and San Francisco 49ers on the field.
He’d been a football official for 17 years, but he’d never experienced anything quite like this.
There he was, a head referee in the CFL, working as a field judge in an NFL exhibition game as part of an officials development program run by the two leagues.
“It was a pre-season game, but there were 78,000 people there,” Foxcroft says. “Denver had just come off winning the Super Bowl so the fans were crazy.
“Being a head ref in the CFL, I have the play going away from me all the time. In the NFL they had me as a field judge, which is a sideline official, and I had the play coming at me all the time. It was a completely different look for me. But you have to be able to flip the switch and do that.”
Foxcroft, was one of three officials from north of the border to take part in the program last year, along with Justin McInnes of Edmonton and Dave Hawkshaw of Vancouver.
Each of them attended training camps and clinics for NFL officials, worked mini-camps with NFL teams, refereed scrimmages in main training camps and got into one pre-season game.
“I got to see everything that happens pre-game as officials prepare to go out on the field and that was very beneficial to me,” says Foxcroft, who has worked more than 250 CFL games and four Grey Cups. “Also to learn what the head referees do. I was able to learn from my referee on how he handles his crew. Myself being a head referee in the CFL, that was very beneficial for me.”
The NFL-CFL Officiating Development Program was created in 2016 to help officials on both sides of the border get more time on the field and to learn from one another.
Six NFL officials came to a training camp in Canada and worked in five CFL pre-season and regular season games apiece.
“Here’s the best part about it … nobody knew,” CFL senior vice-president of football operations Glen Johnson says. “We put them in the downfield position where they’ll really only call things related to passing or blocking on special-teams plays. Those are the areas where our games are most the same.”
Johnson was one of the founders of the program, along with Dean Blandino from the NFL. It was so successful last season that it was expanded for 2017.
A total of six CFL officials travelled south of the border this month. Six NFL officials already participated in a four-day CFL officials training camp in Guelph, Ont., back in May. They are staying here and working in CFL team training camps and games until NFL training camps get underway in late July.
“If you think of any other industry, there are ways for people to attend seminars, take training, learn best practices of an industry by getting together with their peers on an annual basis,” Johnson says. “For us, the NFL is really the only other league that kind of does what we do. It’s always made a lot of sense to me that if we had an opportunity to spend more time together, we can learn more from each other. Just spending time with them and saying ‘Why do you guys cover those plays like that? Here’s how we cover them.’ And we talk about it and maybe we learn something.”
Winnipeg’s Brian Chrupalo, Jason Maggio of Burlington and Rob Hand of Hamilton are new to the program this year. The more officials involved in the program, the CFL believes, the better.
“I definitely improved just from what I learned down there and from what I was able to share down there,” Foxcroft says. “With the rules differences it really forced me to get into the rule book a lot more and to get into the mechanics book a lot more.
It allowed me to study more, review things more.
“We were able to go to another league, that does things differently, and we were able to discuss things and review them and myself and the other two officials who went down last year, we actually submitted quite an extensive report to the (CFL) board of governors.”
It’s all about having the most professional officials possible.
Officials in the CFL are parttimers and they are paid per game based on their experience.
There are 48 on-field officials — plus nine officiating supervisors and five video officials — and on weekdays they are lawyers, accountants, fire fighters, police officers, teachers.
On weekends they have some of the most scrutinized jobs in the country.
Through the addition of video replay officials, coaches’ challenges and other innovations, the CFL has clearly improved its oft-maligned officiating.
Programs like the NFL-CFL partnership, and even the late May training camp in Guelph, attended by officials from across the country, are about improving even more.
“It’s a really good, positive experience,” Johnson says. “It’s unlike anything else they’ve ever done. You can’t get this kind of training and development anywhere else. They were treated very well and the NFL guys who came up to our training sessions took it seriously and had a new appreciation for our league and the quality of football that’s played up here.”
No exact figures were available, but the league says it has invested a “very significant amount of money” to improve officiating, including video review innovations, sending officials to team training camps and year-round betterment efforts like the NFLCFL development program.
The league’s officiating department also reviews every play in every game and provides the in-game officials with comprehensive assessments of their performance.
It’s similar to how things are done in the NFL, where all but a handful of the officials are parttimers who are always looking for ways to improve.
Foxcroft says when he first arrived at a clinic in New Jersey last June, the NFL officials who had already been to Canada were talking about how beneficial the program was for them.
“I’ll always maintain, if you can referee in the CFL, with our motion and our field, 12 men … if you can referee our game, you can referee any game,” Foxcroft says. “It was a quite extensive program. It’s about sharing best practices. It’s not like we just go down and referee a game. We work towards it and we learn a lot of things.”