I have two relatives that officiated for years at the high school level and have known a few more that did it long term as well. My two relatives were die hard Bama fans, but say something about even a blatantly bad call against Bama and you’re fighting them. In my experience, officials will absolutely not criticize one of their peers. It’s conventional wisdom that any occupation needs oversight from someone that’s done the job, but this job needs some oversight thats not blindly loyal to their own. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything else that has fines levied when they criticized, either.
There needs to be oversight and accountability for every profession or it ends up having members that abuse their position or get sloppy. The Head of Officials at a minimum needs a couple of people over him that can override any interference in discipline and ignoring complaints. Technology also needs to be used where it can to eliminate human error. Rules like targeting, where there’s a huge margin of subjectivity need to be eliminated, especially since it can affect more than one game. We have concussion protocol now and unsafe tackles can be dealt with differently now, imo.
