Becoming a Prepared Football Official

Just like many other things in life that include groups, an officiating crew must have communication and comradery to be effective. Football officiating crews need to work well together if they want the season to be successful. Here are some ways to help your crew be successful. If you have and comments or questions, please feel free to reach out to me here . The first thing Football officiating crews need to do is get together before the season. Make sure everyone knows each other. Just spending some time together and learning things about everyone will make a huge difference when working together. Talk mechanics and philosophies together. There are many different ways to do things in football officiating. There needs to be a time that the crew talks mechanics through. What hand signals are you going to use? How are you going to handle spots on long passes and runs? What communication do crew members want throughout the game? Make sure you know all of this before the first ga...

Taking football officiating quizzes and tests can be one of the hardest parts of the whole season for many officials. I personally find the tests to be the hardest. But why are they so hard and what are some tips to help you through them? Let me try and help you out with that question. To start, many great officials struggle on tests. In my experience, tests do show how well you know the rules, but doesn’t always quite correlate to the type of official you are on the field. Reading a question and seeing something on the field are two very different things. Additionally making test hard is the fact that on tests, things happen that honestly never happen in a game. But they help you think through complex chains of events. Therefore, to help you get through the test successfully, sit down with your rule book and case book and work through each question slowly. Picture the play happening in your head and everything you are dealing with. Go to the rule book and case book and read up on ...

Early on, I went through some reasons that people should decide to officiate football. However, there are also some reasons people shouldn’t choose to officiate. The main two reasons you should not let yourself take the leap and become a football official is so that you can officiate in the NFL and so you can make good money. While those things may happen to some people, it is EXTREMLY rare. When you think of all of the thousands upon thousands of football officials at every level across the country, there are only about 125 NFL officials in the whole world! Anyone who is officiating to make it to the NFL, they may want to look at the percent chance and just buy a lottery ticket instead! Even making it to be an official in the Big 10 is extremely rare. Additionally, people that decide to officiate to make a lot of money because they heard how much some professional officials make, they may be in for a rude awakening. Yes, most of the time officials get paid nice amounts for the gam...

For this third and final equipment post, I will be helping you know what clothes you need for your uniform to officiate football. I saved this for last since many times, people have the most questions on this part. However, before I get going, I wanted to tell everyone that earlier I strongly recommended you join your area officials association, you can read that post here . If you do, many times people have extra clothes or equipment they are giving away for free! Take advantage of that as just another reason to go to an association meeting. To start, you need some shoes. There are many out there and all different brands. Try to find a store in your area that sells them and try some on to see which are most comfortable to you. Also talk to other officials to see what their favorites are. With your shoes, make sure you have black socks. You will also need officiating pants. These are black with a white stripe down the side. College and High school officials where the same pant...

No matter if you are starting to officiate high school or college football, almost everyone has questions about what equipment they need. In this part two blog, we will cover bean bags, flags and game cards. I will try to give you the basics and point you in the right direction of where to get it. Like always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know here . When it comes to bean bags, what color you need depends on the level of football you are officiating. If you are going to be officiating football at the high school level, you need blue bean bags . If you will be officiating college, you need black bean bags . Bean bags can be skinny and long or just one big pouch of beans. Which type you get is completely up to the official. For every game, you should have two bean bags on you, especially if you are a back judge. For flags, high school officials use all yellow flags while college officials have the ball of their flag black . You can buy them like th...

No matter if you are starting to officiate high school or college football, almost everyone has questions about what equipment they need. I will try to give you the basics and point you in the right direction of where to get it. Like always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know here . To start, you need a bag to put all of your equipment. Many officials I have worked with use suitcases but that isn’t a requirement. Some officials use over the shoulder gym bags as well that work just fine. Whatever the bag, try to find one that has separate compartments to keep clothes and then accessories such as whistles and bean bags. Here is an example of one possibility, but any suitcase would work. Next, assuming you are not the referee, you will need a black hat with white stripes. Some of the white stripes are bigger than others. Most officials where hats that have thinner white lines, but for most high school and DIII college, it doesn’t make a huge difference. ...

If you are a new reader to Prepared Football Official’s blog, first welcome! I am glad you are here. Please take some time to read the About Me which can be found here and the Purpose page found here . You have also missed some early blog posts I posted. One of my favorite early blog posts was, “Why You Should Make the Leap and Start Officiating Football.” This post talks about many of the benefits that can come from you deciding to become an official. Some of the benefits range from communication and composure skills to test taking and teamwork. All things that can help you in all aspects of life. Take a look at this blog here . Another important early post was about one of the most important steps when becoming a football official, joining an area association. Being around other officials will not only help you learn the rules faster and better, but it will also help you get to know fellow officials so you can get some game assignments. Crews are eager to get some new blood out o...

For all of the football officials out there, I think there are 2 books that you must have. If you are officiating high school football, you need to get the NFHS “High School Football Rules Simplified and Illustrated.” This book is a wealth of knowledge! If you have read through the regular rule book before, it is very likely that sometime while reading it you dozed off. It just has that affect. Everything is so technical with all the exceptions and to follow you have to jump back and forth pages. Well this simplified and illustrated rule book is what the title says! And who doesn’t love a good picture book! This book breaks down the different rules and puts them in a way that actually makes sense. Plus, almost all of the rules come with a picture to help you visualize the rule. If you would like to look at this book or order it, it can be found here . The next book is the “Football Officiating Mechanics Illustrated” by Jeff Stern. For high school you will usually get the book for 4 a...

The CFO website , which stands for college football officiating, is a tremendous site for every official no matter if you are just starting college football, or a seasoned pro. The CFO website can also be good for high school officials if you are actively thinking about rule changes between the college and high school games. If you want a great book on the differences between college (NCAA) and high school (NFHS) I highly recommend the newest edition of “Football Rule Differences” by Paul Whiteside, George Demetriou and Jeffrey Stern. The book does a great job of breaking down all the differences in a way that makes sense. Find the most recent book here .  Anyways, back to the CFO website. They post weekly quizzes during the football season to help test your rules knowledge. They will usually post between five and ten quizzes during the offseason to keep officials fresh on the rules. But beyond the rules, they offer some of the best, or most helpful, videos out there. The vide...

Hey everyone. Thank you for reading my blog! I really hope that you have learned something about football officiating that has helped you decide to become an official or has helped you become a better official. From my blog, I really want to share the news with people about why officiating is a great idea besides just for some extra money. And in case you have not read my about me blog, there a ton of opportunities all over the country for you to get involved with officiating football! We desperately need more to make sure schools can find an adequate number of officials. If you want to read more about the benefits of football officiating, read my earlier post  here . I have already written one post about how to be better prepared for the season which you can read here . However, I really look forward to doing more posts like these. I want to share my knowledge and experiences with all of you to help you become a better prepared football official, like this blog is so wonderfully...

Something that you won’t learn from a rule book is the importance of keeping coaches and players off “the white.” The white is the sideline and it should be about 2-3 yards deep. During the play, no player, coach, or chain crew should be in the white. Some officiating crews and chain crews like to keep the chains in the white…. DON’T! I have seen too many players and officials hit the chain sticks and get hurt. There is no need for them to be that close to the field.  Nothing but the officials should be in the white during a play. If players and coaches are in the white during the play, officials can be running on the sideline at full speed and run into someone, having the potential to hurt both people. When Football officials are running, they rarely have the luxury to be watching where they are going. If they did, they may miss something. Also, when coaches and players are in the white, it makes it that much easier for them to affect the play while they should not be. Maybe a p...

For current officials, armchair officials and people who just like to keep up on the happenings of officiating, especially at the NFL level, Football Zebras is a very informational blog site. The site has tons of different areas to explore such as rules school, film study, rules and mechanics. The rules school does a great job of showing NFL rules in a fun interactive quiz way. Questions usually get posted after controversial calls on a Sunday game and it helps bring clarity for why the call was or was not made. No matter what level of official you are, it is a great way to test your rules knowledge. The film study section within Football Zebras is a great way for people to visually learn the rules. Everyone who officiates, especially football, knows the importance of watching film. You can read a rule in a rule book 100 times, and yet when you see it out on the field you may not remember those words from the rule book. Watching a video lets you process it as if you just saw t...

For those officials out there eager to learn things beyond just the rule book, blogs are a great place to look. My recommendation to you is to go to football zebras blog. Once there search for the post called “Calm Signals: the sign of under-control officiating.” This post does a great job of explaining how we as officials communicate and show we belong in the stripes on the field with the signals we give. No matter if it is an incomplete pass, fumble recovery, or penalty enforcement, we as officials must also know our signals are being watched and reflect on us. As the post points out, there are some plays that are very exciting, to the point everyone is on their feet cheering. However, the official has to have composure and take the whole play in. They can’t look excited for a team and they must show through there signals that they have been there before and are a professional. However, like the post by football zebras accurately mentions, sometimes a big signal is necessary...

1. Make sure your registration is current - whether it is for a state high school association or a college conference, make sure you have the proper registration or license to officiate that season. 2. Watch necessary videos - some levels and divisions of football will require you to watch a video that highlights new rule changes and points of emphasis for the year. Make sure to watch this early and often. (if it is actually an informative video, if not, go find a good one online. I recommend looking at the NFHS site for high school and CFO site for college.) 3. Take the test - you will almost always have at least 1 test you must take in order for you to be able to officiate that season. Open it early and print it out. Then you can slowly go through it writing things out to help you. If you have questions, don’t be afraid to ask, working through the test with the rule book and a fellow official can teach you a lot. 4. Review the rules - make sure you leave enough time before...