Sidelines and Bloodlines

August 1, 2020
ESPN writer McGee enlists his father and brother to describe a side of college football that few spectators consider. When it's a family affair, football, writes the author, is "a childhood of Xs and Os, watching fathers spend their summers dissecting game film, knowing that every autumn weekend will never be free for other activities." Moreover, in his particular family, he and his brother, Sam, learned that there were not two sides in a game but three, the third being the one that "doesn't arrive in a chartered jet"--namely, the referees and umpires. The author's father, Jerry, enrolled in East Carolina College (now University) with an eye to becoming a coach, but he was steered into officiating early on, working as a referee until 2009. As the author maps out, there are eight officials in a major college game: the referee, the only one of the officiating staff who wears a white hat and, usually, a microphone to announce a decision to the usually ungrateful crowd, as well as a squad of judges distributed around the field to monitor particular matters. The line judge keeps the game clock, for example, and watches the line of scrimmage, while the back judge also has game-clock responsibilities while keeping an eye out on the deep zone. (Those two judges, McGee adds, are the ones who stand below the goal posts and declare whether a field goal was good or not.) Jerry, his son writes, keeps a few rooms in his home as a personal museum of his time on the field, which added up to more than 400 games in different conferences, one standout exhibit being a photograph depicting a coach screaming at him with the understated caption, "Coach Joe Morrison explains his point of view to a less than interested official." Able sportswriting that, due to its focus on a little-known aspect of the game, will be illuminating even for die-hard fans.

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