re: Replacement refs will begin NFL regular season

spoke to a friend who is a college official and whose Dad is a long time official in the NFL

he said:
the league wants to raise the first year Reff salary and freeze the experienced reffs salary. the league is then saying they are giving the reffs a pay raise when in reality they are taking the steps to phase out the current part time officials and phase in the full time officials.

the league wants to dump the pension plan and roll everyone into a 401K

the full set of brand new NFL reff uniforms for the 2012 season are hanging in his dad's office

the college assignment commissioners told every D-1 and Div 1AA official that if they took the NFL replacement reff contract they were fired from their college jobs immediately because they could not guarantee they would be available for the start of college football season. Plus if they had any shot at landing a spot in the NFL in the future, the Union would black ball them from membership. So the majority of the replacement officials are D-2, D-3, NAIA, JUCO and high school. They are woefully overmatched by the NFL rulebook.

Jerry Markbreit, the NFL official who heads up the training department for the league was fired along with 8 other officials July 20 for refusing to train the replacement reffs. So even the trainers are replacements.

The average NFL crew is expected to complete a game in 2hrs and 50 min to 3 hrs and 10 mins. If the game goes longer than 190 mins without a legitimate reason or overtime the crew will be reprimanded. The average preseason game is running 3hrs and 20 mins to 3 hrs and 40mins. This is going to wreak havoc with the networks and their scheduling.

here is a great SI article from last week with a lot of interesting information