How Changes in Football Led to Larger Officiating Crews

Football officiating crews added members as changes in play made the game more difficult for existing crews to officiate. This post explores when and why new crew members joined the fray.

When the Intercollegiate Football Association met in 1876 and laid down the rules of the game that became gridiron football, the addition of football officials was among the few rugby rules they modified. England's rugby rules naively assumed opposing team captains would honorably handle disputes, but the Americans knew better and opted to add an impartial referee and two judges, each of whom was appointed by and represented one of the competing teams. The judges, sometimes called umpires, ruled on scoring, out of bounds, and advocated for their teams in disputes. The referee settled those disputes, but the combination proved unsatisfactory, and by 1883, the game began using two impartial officials: a referee and an umpire.

The referee was responsible for the ball. He judged where to place the ball, ruled on out-of-bounds issues, and determined whether the ball crossed the goal line or passed through the uprights. The umpire controlled the players, monitoring fouls and unfair tactics. Both kept busy, particularly the umpire who had to monitor twenty-two players capable of foul play.

Referees, who assessed whether the offense had earned a first down, had difficulty doing so since the field had stripes only every five or ten yards, while most first downs came at spots between the lines. To assist those judgments, referees dropped handkerchiefs on the field at the location of the first down. Of course, those handkerchiefs sometimes moved due to play occurring atop them and players kicking them in the direction favoring their sides. The confusion led to adding a third official, the linesman, in 1894. He marked the progress of each play versus the line to gain and monitored the neutral zone. (Read about the evolution of the chains and down box here.) The linesman typically positioned himself five to seven yards outside the widest player on his side of the field. The closed formations of the era often meant the linesman was on the field, whereas today's spread formations force him to the sideline.

The game needed only a few officials during football's tight formation days. Here, Harvard and Dartmouth prepare to slug it out on a sideline play. (1907 Dartmouth yearbook)