NFL considering extra on-field official during preseason

The NFL wants to improve the consistency of officiating, and is considering adding an eighth official to the field during the upcoming preseason, the league’s head of officiating, Dean Blandino, told NFL.com’s Judy Battista on Thursday. The extra official would stand in the offensive backfield with the referee and umpire and serve as an extra set of eyes trained closely on anything happening between the tackles.

The experiment is seemingly in response to the field growing ever-wider due to the advent of spread offenses in the NFL. More players near the sidelines leads to a greater field of vision needed to see everything that’s happening. Rather than task current seven-man crews to do more, the simple solution may be to add an extra body.

The league has experimented with eight-man crews in the past. Battista notes that a “deep judge” was deployed during the 2010 and 2011 preseasons to line up 25 yards into the defensive backfield and gain a better vantage of the four- and five-wide receiver sets that are increasingly becoming more popular. Blandino said that the extra man did help, but the benefit wasn’t enough to add the ref to the regular season lineup.

In this case, the extra ref would be deployed to monitor the trenches. According to Battista, coaches and players have been concerned that defenders have been able to get away with the illegal use of hands more often since the NFL moved the umpire to the offensive backfield from middle of the linebacker corps due to safety reasons. The eighth official could level the field somewhat.

The last time the NFL added an official was 1978, when officiating crews went from six to seven men. Back then, teams passed the ball just 40.9 percent of the time, compared to 54.5 percent today. With teams running spread offenses (or spread concepts, at the very least) with much more frequency, it may be time to give referees some needed help.