It wasn’t triggered by scandal that went straight to the top of its braintrust, but the SEC has joined the Pac-12 in commissioning a third-party review of its football officials.
The SEC has hired Deloitte, an international accounting firm, to check its zebras work, which commissioner Greg Sankey said is a reaction to the intense criticism its refs take on throughout each season.
“I believed then and I still believe we have as good a college football officiating program as there is yet we can still keep improving,” Sankey told the Associated Press, which broke the story. “And we started first looking at how do we communicate about officiating? And it was forward looking to this coming season that the nature of media, the focus on officiating, the fact there are commentators and broadcast booths giving opinions, sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re not correct. You don’t have complete information. Those are game changers for us.”
It remains to be seen how much (if at all) the public will view of that report. Presumably, the worse the score, the more likely the SEC is to keep it under wraps. But the AP reported it will consider using SEC Network to educate the public on how much the job of an SEC official actually entails.
“We want to communicate that we do have people with great integrity who are working as officials both in our program and as people who support our officiating program,” he said.