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BIG TEN CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYSAugust 2, 2010Bill CarolloCHICAGO, ILLINOIS BILL CAROLLO: Thank you for taking the time and interest in Big Ten officiating. What I'd like to do is just highlight what we've gone through the last 12 months in the officiating program and give you focused areas that we've been concentrating on throughout last season as well as in the off-season. And I think a lot of times the media and people, the fans ask who are these people, who are these people that are on the field on Saturdays officiating Big Ten games. And basically they come through the ranks in the geographic area here in the Midwest. But, first of all, they have to have the capability. We look at three things, the first one is capability. And if they don't have the capability to work their way into the system and if they have the capability, they'll be recruited and trained and evaluated. And then once they're in the program they also have to have the capacity to keep improving. If they don't have that ability to keep improving from year to year, from the beginning of the season to the end of the season, they won't be in the program. Maybe the last and most important quality that we look for in our officiating program is character. And we're looking for the professional official that can handle themselves on and off the court, on and off the field in their daily lives, in their community. And something that is very important to us is that character aspect. So they don't have all three of those characteristics, they won't be in our program. When I look going into last season and what we're looking forward to this season, three areas also that we're focusing on. The number one and most important area we're focused in on is player health and safety. And we're doing some things with regard to that as far as training our officials with regard to concussions and the health and the high hits of the players throughout the game. The second area is replay. And we took a lot of time in the off-season looking at replay, looking at the people in the replay booth as well as the technology up in the replay booth. We're making changes in that area and looking forward to some positive things coming along that area. So the third area that we're looking at is regionalization, in making our officiating program more of a national program versus just a Big Ten program. And working closely with David Parry, the CFO, as well as Rogers Redding, the rules editor, trying to get consistency in the officiating program. Consistency, I mean we call it the same way in the first quarter as well as the fourth quarter. If it's a holding in September, it should be a holding in January. That's the idea and that's what coaches are asking us to do, is be more consistent. So with that I'll pause and we'll open it up to some questions. THE MODERATOR: Questions. Q. You've got a lot of attention with replay. Can you tell us what you're doing to improve replay? You mentioned it a second ago. BILL CAROLLO: I think there's couple of aspects of replay. The replay technology in the booth we felt was important. The off-season right after the season, the day after we completed the last game of last season, I think it was December 6, we met with the university presidents and we got together and talked about a couple of areas. One of the areas that we spoke about was replay. And we presented to the presidents that the technology in the booth wasn't as good as the technology in your home or in the local restaurants and the people in the bars and around the country are looking at these plays. They had a better vantage point than our guy in the booth. We've upgraded to HD technology across the board. They're all installed. The men have all been trained on that and we have another training session coming up here in Chicago next week. So not only is it the technology -- I'm not making any excuses on the errors we made on replay last year on technology. But certainly it will improve the game. It will improve our accuracy as well as speed up the process in the replay booth. The second is looking at the skill set. Traditionally we have had officials come from the field with great background 25, 30 years of officiating and move to the replay booth, and we're experimenting and taking a look at the skill set that's in the booth today as well as other skills that we are looking for. Technology savvy. I think Coach Ferentz mentioned he couldn't text. Well, if our guys in the replay booth can't text and Twitter and Google and do a few things like that, they probably won't be able to handle the technology in the replay booth. So they have to be more of a process-oriented, analytical-type-thinking person. Those skills are important in the process. Q. NFL is experimenting with the position of the umpire, moving him in the offensive back field. Has that been talked about at the college level at all? BILL CAROLLO: It's a good question. Timely one. Because we just came off our clinic for the last few days. We made a decision throughout the country for all college, not just Big Ten, that we would not experiment this year but we were going to watch what the NFL is doing as far as mechanics. And player safety is really important. Also the umpire safety is very important. So they're making that change for several different reasons, and we work closely with them looking at the pluses and minuses of that. And this year we're going to watch and evaluate them when the season ends. Get back with the NFL, look at the results. If it's positive results, we certainly would consider it for next year for college football. Q. Dave Parry said recently that one of the things that he tries to get his officials up in the box to do is to not officiate, is to realize that they're just there to -- if the call needs to be reversed, reverse it. What do you talk to them about replays? One of the complaints, if something takes two and a half minutes then it shouldn't be -- it's not indisputable, it shouldn't be overturned. What do you tell your replay officials to say, okay, you just have a very simple job: If it needs to be overturned, it's overturned; if not, let's move on. BILL CAROLLO: I think we're still pretty consistent with that. I think that what we're trying to do is emphasize the process, what's reviewable, what isn't. What's a big-ticket item, what isn't a big-ticket item. Does it have a major impact on the game. And start to go through that process. And if it's not a major -- even if we made an error and put the ball at the 47-yard line and it should have gone to the 45 and it's the middle of the first quarter and first down, we don't have to stop the game for that. The replay was put into the game several years ago and we worked on it as far as what's reviewable and not reviewable. We're trying to keep a tight box around that. If it's not clear-cut that everybody at home -- my little daughter Emma, my fourth child, if she can't see that there should be change, we shouldn't change it. So look at it, evaluate it, and make that decision and move on. THE MODERATOR: Thank you so much. End of FastScripts |
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