Sept. 14, 2007
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| The ACC's Game Day Operations Center is a team effort throughout the entire conference - the league administration, member institutions, the officials, and the people who work in there week in and week out. Doug Rhoads, the conference's Coordinator of Football Officials, provides a behind-the-scenes look into the center. | |
What is the game day operations center? The game day operations center is a tool that gives us the ability to record every one of our televised games, break down the games into important plays and calls, and then analyze the officials' calls. That allows us to improve officiating, to hold the officials accountable, to answer coaches' questions, as well as media questions. The game day operations center is something that's similar to what the NFL uses. There are several other conferences that use different evaluation methods.
We have a football video assistant - Ben Tario - who oversees everything that goes on in the room. On game days, we have a volunteer intern for each game that is in play. There is also an official in the center who provides an officials' insight to the process.
We have an array of electronic equipment in place that helps us get the job done. Every one of our televised games comes into the center through a satellite feed. When those games come in, we record each game in its entirety. There's a DVR that allows the intern and the official who are sitting in there to look at each play right away after it happens. They can rewind it and decide if it's a play we want to tag for later review.
There are certain kind of plays we always tag - every foul that's called, every foul that's missed, every well-officiated play, every poorly-officiated play, any misconduct - the entire game. We gather all those plays and then we have a running tag. A tag just tells you where the play occurred, such as "Second quarter, 2:41, North Carolina ball, etc."
Over the course of the weekend, Ben (the football video assistant) is able to extract all those plays and dump them into a computer and out of that footage a "draft" is created; which contains probably 60 plays on it at first. The goal is to get it down to the 30 plays that are most relevant for that week. They are either game-impacting plays, plays that were missed and were significant, or "Hey, this is done real well, this is how we want it done." So it's training, it's response to the coaches, it improves officiating, it improves the accountability for the officials. It proves we're right, proves we're wrong.
We have four double DVR (Digital Video Recorder) stations, so the signal comes in from the satellite and goes to all the DVRs. At each station, an intern is able to review on the monitor what comes in and tag it. A running log is kept of all tagged plays and from that log Ben transfers these plays into another computer. In addition to the television footage, we receive footage from each school that allows us to thoroughly review all the plays that are in question. From that, I select the roughly 25-30 plays that go on to the weekly training video. Then the selected plays are fed to the telestrator, where I sit with the microphone and "play John Madden" utilizing state of the art graphics tools to better illustrate the point of the play.
Realistically, four is the most we can do full-scale. We have two more stations where we can record additional games that we are not editing.
There are two components. One is purely technical. You have to have the basic components of keyboard skills and operating DVR and remote control, it's a moderate level of technical skills. The skill that we're after the most is the sports skill - the knowledge of football or the interest in football and officiating. We try to marry the two skills up. We have some young interns from GTCC (Guilford Technical Community College) and UNC Greensboro and a knowledge high school student working each weekend. They are technically oriented and are in the broadcast or communications department at their school. More importantly, they're also sports nuts, which is the best possible thing.
The toughest part is getting the officiating perspective. People watch the game, but don't watch the game the same as an official would. Officials are looking for whether a player's foot was out of bounds, whether it was a catch, not a catch, etc. So we try to marry those two skills up.
We transfer the final training video to the Internet. We have an Internet site where it gets posted so every official in the conference can see the video. It's a quick turnaround, because by Thursday, the officials are already leaving for the next game. Our workweek is mostly Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, where we put in 12-14 hour days, because that's when we make our product.
Yes. I was an official on the field in the ACC for 29 seasons. One of the things that you recognize when you're on the field is that you want to get better. Look at how much time our coaches spend in the video room - they probably spend more than half of their workweek not on the field, but in the video room with players, showing them things, diagnosing what other people do, seeing if there's a better technique, a better way.
My thought was that we needed to do the same thing with officials. Officials, even though we're part time and that it's a "weekend" job, need to be good at it at the level we're playing and with the amount of exposure we receive. We are critiqued every day, every week. We just need to make sure we keep improving, and part of that is video. I talked to the coaches and became interested in the NFL model, which is very similar to ours. I also picked up ideas from other conferences and put it all together. A hybrid of those ideas is what we designed here.
That system that we have here was not done in a vacuum. It's a product of what the Video Services staff does; it's a product of Commissioner Swofford and our administration. It's supporting what we do, and coaches and athletic directors who believe that if we're going to spend money, let's spend it on something like this to do what we do better. It's the officials endorsing it. It's also those people in there every week. It's a team effort.
That's the key to the whole thing. It benefits us tremendously in really being able to hold the officials accountable. You can't get at this level and stay there. There is a numerical rating system - each play is evaluated, each call is evaluated, and they get a grade. That video is looked at by retired officials and a technical advisor who is also a replay official on game day - he takes the tape home and rates that official. Ratings are supported by what this video shows us, so that's the first thing - we get better officiating and have better accountability.
The second thing is responsiveness to coaches. Some of these plays, you could look at a hundred times, and half the people would to say it's a fumble and half the people would say it isn't. So, at least with video, we satisfy that we've made our best effort, we answer the coach, and then we're going to move on. Mistakes are still made, sure - we're all human - but we do improve.
The conference also benefits on a national level. When you look at the high quality of our schools, you want to think our officiating is representative of the conference. We want to be considered as a good professional, competent, consistent conference. "CAPS" is a word that we use - Consistency, Accountability, Professionalism, and Standardization. That's what this video gives the conference. With this, we can have the official who lives in Miami see the same thing as the official who lives in D.C. as the official who lives in Boston each week, and say, "This is how we want it done."
We only rate ACC officials. When it's a non-conference game, the visiting team provides the crew. Like when Miami was at Oklahoma, it was an ACC crew. Now if a coach has any issues, we can find the play and I'll send it to my counterpart in the other conference and say, "These are plays our coaches think were missed." They give the answer and we can respond to our coaches. It works the same way if our crews are out at, say, LSU, and they have a question. Any questions go to the SEC coordinator who then sends any play to us, and we can get them an answer.
I think more than anything else is that the people who do this are not out there for the money. It's a year-round thing. There are 10 meetings in the summer; they have a spring and August clinic that they attend. When they go to a game, they have to be there Friday night at 6. They have regular jobs, so they often have to take a half day off on Friday to be there on time, then be at the game site all day Saturday and fly back Sunday. At that point, they've worked 48 hours. You have to like doing this. The officials we have are very professional. We have dentists, we have attorneys, we have stockbrokers, and I personally was an FBI agent. People come from all walks of life to do this job, but they do it because of a love of the game and of the role of officiating. They're very astute, they study the rules, and keep up on the current rule book of football which gets bigger and more detailed every year. They're students of the game. They're fit - we require that they run a mile-run, take a stress test, and also take a physical. So it's not just a hobby, it's a true vocation. I think that's what people need to know, is that it's not just a casual thing. They're committed to it, and they're very good at it. They make mistakes, sure. Players drop balls and fumble things, coaches call a play that doesn't work, and officials do miss some things. But your goal is to not have significant impact, and if you miss a lot of it, then you're going to be gone.
That it has given us full-scale, 100% accountability for what the official does. It's no longer the mystery of years ago where the game wasn't even televised or we got those 16-mm films where you couldn't even see what team it was. Fans should know these are professional people trying to do a very difficult job and do a good job in the process. Replay holds that up - out of every three plays that are replayed and looked at, two of the three stand; they got it right. That's after a guy sitting in the air-conditioned press box looking at a slow-motion replay reviews it and agrees with what they called on the field. The other third that are missed, they fix them. They overturn them and get them right. That's the main thing; we're going to be better because of the game day operations center.
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How does the game day operations center work?
What do you do with the video plays that are selected?
What is the most important thing that you want the average fan to know about officiating?
