SEC Commissioner Mike Slive has now ended all complaints about SEC football officiating by ending complaint altogether. POOF! Look, it’s gone!
SEC Solves Officiating Complaints By Eliminating Complaints
↵“On occasion there were public reprimands and that took care of it. It became clear to me after last week that I was no longer interested in reprimands and the conference athletic directors and university presidents unanimously agreed.↵“For the foreseeable future there will be no reprimands,” Slive added. “We will go right to suspensions and fines.”
↵↵Call it the Lane Kiffin Rule, since the Tennessee coach has been publicly reprimanded twice this season for complaining about the officials. Coaches complaining from this point forward will be immediately fined and suspended, which for Tennessee’s purposes will be fine since Ed Orgeron is really running the team anyway while Kiffin calls recruits and sets new high scores playing Bejeweled. No net loss whatsoever.
↵In terms of public action, Slive’s hand really was forced. Officiating is like currency to a nation’s autonomy: debase it, and everything is lost. The officiating has been horrible, but the extremely valuable investment that the league has become cannot tolerate either the bad officiating or the criticism of it.
↵The mistake wasn’t made by Slive cracking down on dissent. This is stop-gap. The injury occurred in two strokes: a.) the introduction of the unsportsmanlike penalty, an inscrutable rule subject to so much interpretation it is functionally useless, and b.) the reliance on part-time officials.
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If Slive isn’t just turning the league into a restricted speech zone for the hell of it, there will be some kind of officiating rebuild during the offseason. In the meantime, he’ll have to start sending kids to timeout for complaining about the long term effects of mistakes made years ago by the Rules Committee and the SEC itself. Do you see Lane Kiffin pulling a Bobby Valentine and watching the game in the stands with a mustache and glasses on? In our dreams, at least, we certainly do.
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