We're coming to you with an exhilarating conversation featuring our esteemed guest, Claire Gausman, who has undeniably left his mark in the world of football officiating. His journey from a high school official to an NFL scout and now a current replay official in the Mountain West, offers an unmatched perspective and insight. He uncovers the nuts and bolts of officiating - from the evolution of officiating styles to the essentials of managing emotions on the football field.
Navigating the task of officiating isn't just about the play on the field, it's also about handling the emotions and actions off the field. Claire shares his wisdom on managing the thin line between tolerating and listening to a coach's critique, and when it morphs into unacceptable behavior. He underscores the importance of growing a thick skin to cope with the intensity that accompany the game. His experiences form a roadmap for young officials aspiring to grow in this profession.
As an added bonus, Claire takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of the college replay booth. He discusses how technology has significantly enhanced officiating and the rigorous requirements to become an NFL official in todays game. Claire emphasizes the dedication, appearance, rules knowledge, judgment, and communication skills that are required at the heart of reaching this level. Wrapping up our conversation, Claire reflects on the unique bond between the officials and the crowd and the profound sense of accomplishment that comes from officiating at the highest level. This is one episode that will leave you inspired and in awe of the world of football officiating.
We're coming to you with an exhilarating conversation featuring our esteemed guest, Claire Gausman, who has undeniably left his mark in the world of football officiating. His journey from a high school official to an NFL scout and now a current replay official in the Mountain West, offers an unmatched perspective and insight. He uncovers the nuts and bolts of officiating - from the evolution of officiating styles to the essentials of managing emotions on the football field.
Navigating the task of officiating isn't just about the play on the field, it's also about handling the emotions and actions off the field. Claire shares his wisdom on managing the thin line between tolerating and listening to a coach's critique, and when it morphs into unacceptable behavior. He underscores the importance of growing a thick skin to cope with the intensity that accompany the game. His experiences form a roadmap for young officials aspiring to grow in this profession.
As an added bonus, Claire takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of the college replay booth. He discusses how technology has significantly enhanced officiating and the rigorous requirements to become an NFL official in todays game. Claire emphasizes the dedication, appearance, rules knowledge, judgment, and communication skills that are required at the heart of reaching this level. Wrapping up our conversation, Claire reflects on the unique bond between the officials and the crowd and the profound sense of accomplishment that comes from officiating at the highest level. This is one episode that will leave you inspired and in awe of the world of football officiating.
You're just starting your high school officiating career but want to know what the roadmap to the NFL looks like. But we're going to talk about that with this week's guest on your First Downs.
Speaker 2:Welcome to your First Downs, the podcast dedicated to helping new high school football officials. Here are your hosts, Joel Poger and Kirk Russell from the Colorado Football Officials Association.
Speaker 1:All right, good evening, good morning, good afternoon. For wherever you're listening to our podcast. Thanks for spending 30 minutes of your day with us. How you doing today, kirk.
Speaker 3:All good thanks, joel.
Speaker 1:Kirk. There are so many things I wish we could get to this week, but our guest is so fantastic I want to make sure that we give him as much time as possible to share some wisdom with the new officials. Just listen to this bio for our guest this week former high school official, working two state championships, 25 years as a Division I college football official, working in the WAC, the Mountain West, the Big 12, and Conference USA. During his college time he was a white hat for 14 different bowl games. It's a past CFOA president, past Colorado National Football Foundation president and past president for the Colorado Hall of Fame. Former NFL scout and now a replay official in the Mountain West. I'll bet he knows a thing or two about officiating football. Please join me in welcoming our guest this week, mr Claire Gosman.
Speaker 3:And he's still married For the most part.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, Claire. We did talk in a previous episode about how you need your spouse's blessing to be able to be in this profession, so your wife is probably a saint.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:So you have a very distinguished career, Claire. I was very impressed from the day I met you. I don't know if you remember this or not, but you were one of my very first mentors at a camp back in 2013. And can you talk just a little bit about kind of how officiating has changed from the day that you got in, from your first high school game to where the game is at today? Maybe a little bit of history. How has the game changed? How's officiating changed during that time?
Speaker 2:Sure, and I've got some notes here. I tried to put some things together, so don't change the format, don't change the questions, because I've got them all done now. Now it's changed in so many ways and I think maybe the biggest way that it's changed is just in the resources that young officials have. Today, when I started out, we had the rulebook. You've got your colleagues maybe you talk to and you've got meetings. I mean that was it. You were basically on your own. Today. I mean you've got rulebooks and manuals, there's guides, there's videos, podcasts like this one camps. Of course, our college guys have positioned meetings. We started replay meetings, I think back in February, and so it just goes on and on. I have access to DV Sport 360, which some guys are, I'm sure are, familiar with. I have literally every college game from last fall, every single conference, all the way down, up and down, so it's just kind of endless.
Speaker 2:The difference I see in officiating is probably communication. When I was starting out, you made a call and really that was it, and I think we've kind of reached the point now where on the high school level, and definitely on the upper levels, that now someone's not afraid to say, hey, do you see the whole play, or are you sure you had that on? Did you have that on the left tackle that kind of stuff. We kind of question each other. That didn't exist before. You just didn't do that. And of course, as you move up in the officiating ranks, that's more and more they rely on each other. And as you talk to guys, the difference between, like, a Mountain West crew and a Big 12 crew is communication. Big 12 crew to a NFL crew, it's communication. They touch base on everything and they're not afraid to do this.
Speaker 1:I think one thing we got to be grateful for is getting rid of the knickers. Right, have getting rid of the knickers from you know what was it 25 years ago to now. That has to be a major improvement as well.
Speaker 2:And I'm happy to say that I made it through that transition. If I lean to one side you can't really see it, but you can see my favorite plant game ever I worked was once at Notre Dame and we were still in the knickers, so good memory.
Speaker 3:You know, keep in mind, joel, you know a lot of our audience here are new. They're thinking knickers, what the heck are you talking about? But yeah, back in the day we looked a little bit clownish, I think, although we work with some guys that think that was a good look. I don't think so. Yeah, anyway, claire, as you know, we're talking a lot about first downs, first year officials, guys that haven't been on the field, but they are. They're passionate about the game, they want to get involved and one of the first comments we make is you know, you don't get to watch the game the same way, and we make the statement you can't ball watch and I think we fall short in that statement. There's a lot more to what we mean when we say that they eventually figure that out, but what can you do to talk through from beginning to all the way up to the big guys and that whole topic of watching the ball versus? You just mentioned watching other positions and how? How does that play into what we're trying to do here?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, sadly, when you start out, you don't trust anybody else. If you're working a three man crew, if you're working, you know a lot of games, you don't know how good an official they are and you see stuff and you've got maybe a coach over your shoulders and hey, you know 66 is holding on every play and he's the tackle on the opposite side of the field. Does that mean I'm going to make that call from across the field when I don't have a very good view of it? You know, the old expression is still very valid You've got to fish in your own pond, and the more that you work together with a crew, the more you get to work with more veteran guys, the more you understand that. Hey, when the snap goes, as a referee I got 8 to 12 guys to look at and that's my job is right there. I don't know what happens downfield, and coaches need to understand that. Yeah, there was a big time pass interference. Coach, I didn't see that. You know that's. You don't want me looking down there, you want me to call stuff that's 40 yards away. You know that's. That's not so. So the biggest teacher in this whole thing, then, has got to be experienced and you've got to learn to trust guys you work with. And if you're if you're with the same five or six guys you know on a Friday night, saturdays, then you do that, you know.
Speaker 2:Another thing I learned and tried to talk to officials about is what I did at the referee position. I use this phrase you scan, but you don't stare. You know I've got to sit back there and I've got to see maybe 12 guys that are all moving at once. I can't focus in on 66 who's holding on every other play. I can't do that. Things that happen, fouls will come, fouls will jump out at you. I had a really veteran official once who came over to me on the sideline I was working deep and he said did you have bells and whistles on that play? And I looked at him like what are you talking about? And he said this is division one football. If you don't have bells and whistles, you probably don't have a foul. And that stuck with me. You know to this day that you in. It's so obvious when you start looking critically at your own videos yeah, you might have had something, but make it be a foul, make it be big before you jump in there.
Speaker 3:You know you being a white hat for many years. You've probably made this statement. When official comes to you and says I think I had a block in the back on number 17. And you're going to look at him as a white hat and say you don't bring, I think I had fouls to me. You bring, I know I've got a foul Fouls.
Speaker 2:Exactly Great point. You know, and you can tell as a referee. You know the guy, his eyes are this big or her eyes are this big and they're kind of stumbling through things. You know that, hmm, maybe not. And so that's when maybe you call in a back judge or another official and say, hey, to get a look at that. Okay, all right, it was okay, all right. Well, we're going to go with it, yeah.
Speaker 3:So now we've got bells and whistle fouls. I've got a bells and whistle foul and it's a whole. I like it.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So, claire, our show last week was talking about females and officiating and with your experience not only both working in the upper levels, you know and doing some recruiting for the NFL at one point in your career for NFL officials I don't know if we mentioned that in the bio Can you talk a little bit about you know sort of the demand or opportunities for women. We want to see more women get in the game at the high school level. We'd like to see them progress through the ranks. I think some of them would say maybe there's not a lot of opportunities for women. Can you comment on that and just say you know it's now a good time for women to start in officiating.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think, I think it's a great time, I think there's opportunities. I mean, we need, we need numbers, we need officials. We know that in Colorado and as I move around the country, that's literally true in almost every state. Maybe there's an exception here or there. So so we need women to work, we encourage them to work. I think coaches are more tolerant now than than they used to be, especially, you know, in the college NFL level as well. They're recruiting them.
Speaker 2:But you know the days when a player came off the field and coach grabbed him by a face mask and got him to look him straight in the eyes. Those days are kind of over and the reason is because there's cameras everywhere. You know there's. You know our Mountain West this year will have a minimum of nine cameras in every game in the big 12 and most have multi view which have 12 cameras. So in terms of officials, I think the NFL has kind of taken the lead with with women in officiating and they've really kind of encouraged women to be involved. And so if women look at that and say, hey, I like the sport of football, I want to be part of it, they have to understand the commitment involved, the commitment to rules, to to film study and so forth.
Speaker 2:In the area of replay, which is now, I guess, kind of my field, we've got quite a few of women that have become interested in it and it's more I guess you can say it's more of a natural place, because you're not going to get hit up there In the press box. You know, you don't have these 300 pound guys bearing down on you, which maybe that's a factor to. My first indicator in the Mountain West was a female from California. She was terrific, absolutely terrific, very talented, very knowledgeable. She now works in replay in the NFL and you know if they followed that mode? Because she was. She was extremely committed to it, very, very dedicated. She also had three brothers who played college football and two of them are in the pros, so from that standpoint she really knew the game.
Speaker 1:So that was a great experience and we've got a DFOA female that's currently at the D1 level doing replay right Ashley Miller.
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 3:Just saw Ashley and Dallas a couple of weeks ago at our clinic, so Claire, we've talked a fair bit about the impact to the game and around coaches, and you know the intensity coaches bring to the field and, as a newer official, sometimes well, even veteran officials we struggle with managing the emotions ours and theirs in the intense moments and they feel like they're not being treated correctly by the officials, and so can you help us in your experience, maybe some things that can help our audience deal with coaches? We've got some ideas. I think the more ideas, more tools in the toolbox we have, the better anything you can help us out with there.
Speaker 2:Well, I think number one you've got to grow a thick skin and you can't hear everything that's on the sideline. You've got to tune some things out. And I think sometimes that gets really difficult at the high school level because there's not as much control, like I said, on the college level. There's cameras everywhere and so if guys are making statements, they're doing certain things Even if they're looking at a certain way as official. There could be, you know, a follow-up to that. But the number one thing is you have to learn to control your emotions. The temperature on the field is rising because there's tension. You can never let yourself reach that level.
Speaker 2:And you know I've got a couple of stories that I could relate to games where I lost it, and I didn't do that very often, it rarely happened. But you know one in particular I remember well. It was TCU, smu and it was a downpour and the punter went down in the end zone and I know he slipped and this coach went berserk thinking his punter got roughed and I went over and he made some comments to me about. You know, I thought you got better. We used to see you a lot and now I know I'm wrong. You're still terrible and all that kind of stuff and you just have to swallow it. I made some statements, you know I said some things that I shouldn't, but those are things that you learn. You get that, you know.
Speaker 2:But going back to the elect for the high school level, you can never say to a coach, well, that's not my call, you know. You just can't do it because they want to know. Then they want to know whose call it was and why did they miss it. Come on, you had to see what went on. That don't tell me, that's not your call. So you know what you've got to do to save a coach at that point is say, hey, look, if it was the way you saw it, then maybe we missed it. I wouldn't say we did, but maybe we missed it. Or you can say, look, I'm going to ask my partner on the other side what happened there and I will get back to you. And then you got to follow through.
Speaker 2:But you know, for me, I always started out working on the sideline and to me, controlling the sideline, that was part of my job. I did not ever want the referee to have to come over and talk to a coach to call me down. That was my job and in doing so you know you've got to set guidelines, you've got to set thresholds of what you're going to tolerate, what you're not going to tolerate on the high school level. You know that means profanity. You just can't allow it. You can't let him talk to you like that. You got to stop him and start him over and say, coach, kind of got to phrase that another way, or something like that.
Speaker 1:So, Claire, you know, again with new officials and trying to give them, I guess, for lack of a better word concrete guidelines and Kirk and I talked a little bit about this a couple of weeks ago is drawing that line between tolerating and listening and respecting a coach and abuse from a coach. Is there a certain trigger where you mentioned profanity? Is there anything else that, in your mind, kind of triggers that hey, I'm not just listening to this guy now or not being respectful, he's abusing me. Is there a guideline to give a new official for that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think when they get personal, you know, when they say, hey, that we had that up our last week, he's killing us, he hates my guys. He's telling us, you know this kind of stuff, and he's saying stuff that he doesn't like working us and so forth. And you know, all you can do to a say to a coach at that point is say coach, listen, you've taught everything to this point. You got to let us work. You got to let him work. He's a good official. You know those kind of things to say.
Speaker 2:But again, you don't want to throw a flag. You really don't want to do it. If they, if they reach that point, though, maybe you do, and and sometimes there are coaches and I'm convinced of this the only way that they're ever going to really respect you as an official is if you have a confrontation with them. You know they're not your friends. You may have, you may have worked them you know three of the last four weeks and they give you a hug and a handshake before the game, but they are not your friends and if things go south, they're not going to be on your side. So you know it's, it's good to develop rapport with, with coaches, but you've got to make sure you draw the line there. I never call the coach by a first name, I always call them coach and you, just you got to understand that there is a buffer there, there's a distance, that you've got to keep that coach at a distance and and try to go that route.
Speaker 3:You know it's interesting, joel, there was hanging around a lot of guys like Claire that have that have moved up the ranks. Nfl D D one, a very common denominator that I know I recognized before, but it just is so apparent right now is demeanor. And again we're talking to some newer officials and you can be the best rules guy, you can have the best mechanics If you're demeanor on the field and your control of your emotion is not. That's not a natural, and I've I've seen all these top level officials. They share that one common component and that is their ability to control emotions and and work with coaches. And so I think you know we we talk about what are those important pieces. That one is probably the most out of all of them.
Speaker 2:You know, and I think as officials we've got to be careful about what we say to players. To we can never use profanity to players. On the high school level Now, on the college level, you can say to kids hey, knock that shit off. Or you know, hey, that's bullshit. I saw what you did. That's bullshit. They're not going to go to the sideline and say, hey, coach, you swore at me, but in high school they may do that. And so you, you, you know, you've got to be aware that you're not going to say to a kid hey, you know, don't hold him, you don't count the Pillars, no, yeah, yeah, you know. You say, watch your hands. You know, be careful, watch your hands. So it's a matter again, like you said, it's a matter of experience and knowing what to say and what you can't say. And on the high school level, you gotta be careful.
Speaker 1:So, claire, our next topic is talking about moving up, and this was kind of one of the most exciting parts I wanted to get to. And I hear that, by the way, I think of the old Jefferson's tune from the 70s. I know I'm kind of dating myself here, but maybe I'll play that in the background. I don't know if you remember this. I know you meet a lot of new officials and it was honestly a memorable moment for me. So I told you, I met you at one of my very first camps. We were on the practice field for CSU up in Fort Collins, colorado. At the time I was training for the referee position. This is probably I don't know 2013, maybe 2012.
Speaker 1:You were sitting in a golf cart, we were working in evening scrimmage and it was my turn to be off the field for a few plays and I came over to you and I had said I really want to get to the NFL, claire, tell me how to get there. And you asked me some questions. You said how old are you, how dedicated are you and those kinds of things. And I'm really dedicated. I'm still doing it 12 years later.
Speaker 1:Of course, I didn't make it to the NFL, but I think everybody has that dream. The first time they get on the field they think I'm going to be in the NFL. I want to get there Is. There's no career path that I've been able to see or identify. And in my time again in doing this, I've seen some guys that have worked half a season to high school and get moved up to college and progress very, very quickly. I've seen some very, very good high school officials that possess all the right qualities in my mind and they can't even get up to the college level. How do you I mean how do you tell somebody or encourage somebody to move up or to practice or to follow this path of getting to their dream of maybe the NFL?
Speaker 2:Well, I strongly believe there is no shortcut, and what you talked about and will be mentioned before is commitment. You can, and I think there are guys that work high school level and they're happy with that and that's they're resolved to be a good high school official and that's great. If you want to work the next level, you got to understand it's a huge commitment it is. I mean. I go back to my days I was going to rules meetings, small college division one meetings, three days a week. I'm going to borrow something from the later Brown who said if you look like you never put on a jock, you're in for a long night. You've got to have a certain appearance that works out there. You don't have to be chiseled out of iron, but you've got to have an appearance that makes it look like you've been successful. But as I I'm going to go to my son real quickly, who now is a major league pitcher but coming up we didn't talk about that. We had 28 teams come to our house his senior year and tried to convince us that he should go to pro ball and we kept saying to him listen, if you can succeed at the high school level, you get a good chance to succeed on, maybe on the college level, but that's a huge step to go from college to the NFL and to go from high school to college. That kind of stuff I you know. I just want to share for a second. I got it back from some of my notes when I was with the NFL and here's some things that we looked at. Number one on the list was appearance, and I was told to do that all during pregame. And then the next thing on the list was movement. So not only did an official look good, how did he move? Could he run? Maybe he looked good standing in the uniform, but he really couldn't move around. Another one was rules knowledge. Now that was kind of tough because the guys that I was looking at I sure hope they have a good sense of the rules.
Speaker 2:Four was judgment. You know that's a key thing and yet I don't know what all their supervisors are telling them to do and asking them how to work a certain position. Next one communication skills. You know, are they? I know I had some officials that were strong in the first quarter. By the fourth quarter they quit signaling the down, they quit looking around, they quit talking to their partners and that kind of stuff. It just you know, it just happens You've got to work four quarters. Another one was how well do they work with their crew and with their coaches? And I can remember an official that, a referee that I saw, who just seemed like every dead ball. He's over talking to the coach. Bad look, bad look. Is that wing official weak enough, so weak that he needs that? Or are you in that kind of a situation with the coach that you've got over there? And then number one I thought was really important do they own the position? Do you look at that person and say, oh yeah, yeah, they, they know what they're doing on the wing or as a back judge, especially boy, he knows what he's doing, he knows what he's looking for. So that those were really kind of the seven things that I remember from some of the things.
Speaker 2:It's a tough pass to go from high school to college and again I go back to commitment and from there, you know, do you really gonna put in?
Speaker 2:Are you really gonna dedicate enough time that you need to?
Speaker 2:You know we mentioned in our pregame thing Do you have a spouse, do you have a family that's going to come out with you, because you're going to be gone a lot of nights and you might put in a number of years on this level and think I'm not moving, and Be willing, you know, be willing to accept that it's very competitive at the small college level and it gets even more so on, you know, at the division one level and then hyper competitive into the NFL level.
Speaker 2:Now we do have camps. I guess, if you want to talk about a short cup, short cut, there are some camps around different places that division one assigners go to and and maybe that's a way for them to get a look at an official and and no more from that camp. Maybe then I don't necessarily agree with it. We used to our system used to be kind of they would call certain officials in Colorado and say, hey, who's the best fisher? You got there, and it was a matter of trust, it was a matter of building up kind of a resume as you started out and then moving up from there.
Speaker 1:So can you talk just a little bit, just so we can kind of set expectations? I mean, our, our normal high school official is not the 20 something year old, right, the younger officials, and I wish I would have started doing this at a much younger age. When you and I had that conversation, you know, in the golf cart on the CSU field, I was already 43, 44 years old. Is there a certain I mean at a point? Does age become a factor in moving up? I mean, I was fortunate enough to make a couple years in the armack, but you know, if that's a, this is a physically demanding Vocation for officials as well as players and coaches and everybody else. And after years of sports, you know, my knees just couldn't hold out running down the field anymore and came back down to high school. So that's a little bit slower-paced game. How much does age play a factor in that moving up?
Speaker 2:Well, it's not. It was never in my notes, but If an official you know, we, we can kind of tell from looking down there, we can also do a little investigation. You know he's, it's it's his first year in in the Big Sky conference, it's his eighth year in the big sky. It's his third year in the big 10, something like that. Most of the officials that I looked at, I was fortunate the NFL gave me a schedule where most of the guys that I was looking at were very close. They were close to the NFL or they'd been working, you know, division-run level for quite a few years. So so, yes, there is an age, but I think what I would encourage officials to do I had a form letter that I broke out in the spring and in the fall.
Speaker 2:I take it back in the summer and in the fall and I would send you know supervisors, I I've a letter that I worked on very hard to get it just the right lengths, it wasn't too long and I would tell them what I would been doing, what I've been doing. I would tell them my schedule, hopefully that they would look at and say, oh, okay, so that's just something that I came up with, that I did on my own, but I would send that to three or four supervisors. I sent it to the NFL. I got a nice letter back saying, hey, keep doing what you're doing. But they never showed much interest in me. But and I was happy where I was and and you know, it's kind of funny I came up with an era where where college football was really more a bigger deal than the NFL. And I grew up in Nebraska and I mean Nebraska, oklahoma, was a bigger deal than any NFL game on any weekend. So maybe, maybe I was more enticed by that than Really getting to the NFL.
Speaker 1:Well, in my mind you should have been there a long time ago, but we're I know we say this every week we run short of time. This 30 minutes goes really really fast. Can you talk just really briefly about being in replay? Maybe that is a career path and maybe kind of what. What goes on behind the scenes and replay and we're. We may dedicate a Whole episode of that somewhere in the future, but you know we don't see a lot of the replay booth. Can you talk about just a little bit what happens there, kind of behind the scenes?
Speaker 2:Sure, of course. I mean replay has been around on the college level since oh six and it there's. There's really one reason that it's around and that's HDTV. It reached the point where you could see that he was out of bounds. And they didn't call him out of bounds. And of course, the big 10 had some issues along the way and they were the first ones that started it.
Speaker 2:But what we do and I'll just give you a typical weekend we go through the same pregame like everybody else. When we get to the stadium, then we're going to spend a lot of time Into the technology end of it. Do we have all nine of these cameras sink into my monitor? And then my partner, mike Contreras, that you both know very well. Mike is my communicator and so he's got one feed on his TV. That's only the program fee. I have nine cameras that feed into me. Now I personally will say this to only a few people I think it's overkill. I don't really need an all 22 camera on every shot. It might be nice once a season that you need something like that.
Speaker 2:But then what happens? On each play? Mike is giving me the information. Hey, we got a first down on the play and we'll double check that. And then we go to these, these nine cameras, and we'll see is there an issue? Okay, then, which camera am I gonna do?
Speaker 2:Okay, end zone cameras are your lifeblood. Cart cameras are important. If you're looking at the line of scrimmage, once in a while you get a, you get a handheld that is right down the goal line, which will save everybody. And then we sort through those and say, maybe we've got two of them now that we want to pull up, and so it's done by push button. So now I've got two screens in front of me that are synced. So they're gonna be exactly the same and I can see exactly. You know, at what point did this runner lose the ball? Did he break the plane before he got? You know, did he lose the ball before he got to the goal line?
Speaker 2:Playing that kind of stuff now for this year, and we haven't done much of this but we have collaborative replay. So while I'm doing this and talking to myself and talking to Mike, who's on the win with it, with the announcers, then Dallas is listening in to me and they're seeing my information, and then they're gonna say I'm gonna say them hey, no, he was down, the ball was out, no touchdown. So we're gonna reverse this and now Dallas is either gonna agree with that or they're gonna say, hey, take a look again, because that's not the feeling that we have. It's kind of ironic that, you know, one of my cameras is the program feed and right above it it's labeled dirty feed because it goes first to the camera where they put the graphics on the screen. So I don't see anything actually seconds afterwards. And especially for some of our Mountain West games they are remote broadcasts. So it may be going all the way to Charlotte or Orlando and it comes and I'm just sitting there waiting for it, waiting for it. But that's basically how replay works from top to bottom.
Speaker 2:I think you see a lot of interest in replay. A lot of people. I tell people I'm really good at watching TV and that's why I'm in replay. But it's also a blend to me of all the time that I spent on the field.
Speaker 2:I do believe that replay inserts itself too much into the games. At times you guys know you've got a great rhythm in a game and then all of a sudden something happens. In your case, maybe the chain breaks on the sideline at five minutes late. That's the way a lot of officials feel about replay. We had a great game. They're moving the ball down the field and all of a sudden you stopped it and then you decide to go stands because he was in bounds and we had him in bounds anyway. So that's what you run into. We get a few they're a handful of games every weekend across the country that are decided by something that's in replay, and coaches absolutely believe in replay and they want it. When I started out, the college rulebook was about this thick, and now it's doubled in size because, since I started, we added overtime and replay and 10-second runoff, and so it is easily doubled because of replay. Some people hate it, some people love it. It's interesting, though, but anyway.
Speaker 1:Clare, thanks for spending a minute talking about that and how replay works and what you're doing in the Mountain West. I know that really doesn't pertain to new officials, which is what this podcast is about, so it's always kind of exciting to learn what goes on behind the scenes. A lot of us just sit at home and on Saturday or Sunday watching the TV and I don't think we can really comprehend or appreciate what's kind of happening behind the camera. So again, thanks for going into that.
Speaker 3:Clare, it's a pleasure to have you join us in this podcast. I love doing this, and especially when we bring guys like you in that can give us some insight into all this other space that we don't get to see at the high school level. As we wrap this up, my last question to you is let's do a little bit of a role play. You've got a group of officials in the locker room ready to go out for their very first game and, as we know, that first one you're puckered up, no matter what level it is. It's pretty intense and you have a couple nuggets of advice that you could give these officials as they make their entrance into the field their first time.
Speaker 2:Well, of course, I think you rely on them. To A it's about positioning and B it's about judgment, and there's nothing you can do in the last 10 minutes to make that any better. You either study the rules, you know the rules or otherwise. But I would say to that level and to every level, you can get in more trouble off the field than you can on the field and you've got to be careful of that. I can name a half a dozen officials who have done things off the field that have damaged or sidetracked their career. So never trash another official. It's easy to do and sometimes maybe we feel good because maybe we think that elevates that.
Speaker 2:But I was told a long time ago, silence can never be quoted, so you've got to be careful. What you say to coaches, if you're going to quote a rule to them, you better know the rule. If you're going to make a statement about, these are things that we just don't call, are you sure? Because that's not what the rulebook says, that kind of stuff. Another thing I would say to them then is and maybe this is moving to another level then but just think about your officiating future. Where do you want to be five years from now? Where do you want to be 10 years from now?
Speaker 2:There is nothing wrong with a high school career, of just working high school football. But are you thinking about, hey, in five years I want to be working the playoffs, or I've got my eye on working the state championship. If you're not progressing towards those kind of goals, then I guess rec league football is better money than probably the high school level. But if you want to be serious about it and I honestly believe I've officiated baseball and basketball Nothing comes close to as much fun as you can have with five, six, seven guys or eight guys up to ten. On a Saturday we're going to football game, you walk off the field, and how can you match that? I've never been in the military or law enforcement, but I'm sure they have that same kind of feeling about accomplishments. But boy, football officiating is that bond that you have. It's seven of you versus 50,000 of them, so that's pretty special too.
Speaker 1:Claire, I'm so sorry, but we are over our time, so we're going to wrap this up quickly. First, thank you again for being here this week. A lot of amazing nuggets and value for new officials coming into the game. And don't forget, if you've got a question or want to get in touch with Kirk and I, go to yourfirstdownscom. Again, that is yourfirstdownscom, and we'll address your comment or question on the air. Thanks so much and I'll see you guys next week.