Sporting Events - Why Do Referee's Make Bad Calls? - They Can't Help It

Every spectator, no matter if they are sitting on the side lines at a live event or watching at home on television has disagreed with a referee's call at one time or another. What appears to be blatantly obvious to you the spectator is oblivious to the game official. Why is that? The referee is suppose to have a professionally trained eye and improved knowledge of the game rules and offenses. How come they seem to make so many mistakes in their calls? How often after a review of the side line instant replay footage has it been necessary to retract a ref's call? Well, the fact of the matter is, even though they are referees, they are still human and their calls are governed by human conditions.

Let's take color for instance. Referees prefer red. It is a human condition. In a Tae Kwon Do study, the event officials scoring the fighter on film gave more points to the opponents wearing red then they did to the ones in blue. When asked to review the exact same footage in which the uniform colors were digitally switched, ie the once red opponent became blue and the once blue opponent became red, the officials ruled in favor of red again.

Our brain creates an illusion to compensate for the 100 millisecond delay that occurs between it and our eyes. This illusion shifts objects in the direction they are traveling while we are watching them. A tennis ball hurling toward the baseline may appear to cross the baseline even before it bounces just inside because of this innate illusion. This brain-eye illusion resulted in 70 of 83 bad calls being made during the 2007 Wimbledon Tennis Championships according to vision scientist.

The crowd's reaction affects the referees' judgment. I know it is not suppose to but it does. Remember they are still human and they listen to the crowd. To test this, researchers asked two different sets of soccer officials to judge some game clips. One group watched the footage with no sound. The other group watched the footage with sound. The referees who watched the footage with sound, thus able to hear the fans called 15.5 percent fewer fouls against the home team then the other group. With this fact in mind, for your child's next soccer meet, a well placed entourage of maniacally screaming spectators could possibly sway the game.

With this knowledge of game official frailties due to the human conditions, doesn't it make you feel bad about hanging the referee in effigy and demanding their immediate demise? They are doing their best; however there are involuntary systems built-in that interfere with their judgment. How do you over ride the human condition?

Resource: 3 Smart Things About Referees - Wired Magazine - August, 2009

Tags: referee, game officials, soccer officials, football refs, sports