Mike Florio

And there's some language in there that I interpret as being extremely broad as to the ability of the league office to just talk in the ear of the officials on the field to say, hey, you may be getting that wrong.

You may need to take a closer look at that.

You may need to talk about that.

Over and above being able to overturn rulings during the game.

They didn't have this power in 2012.

That was before they centralized replay at the league office.

And the cynic in me, and there is one lurking in there who comes out from time to time, the cynic says that that may have been one of the reasons why they centralized replay.

If we ever have to lock out the officials again, we'll have a way to help

the replacement officials to avoid another fail-merry outcome, which is what they're trying to do.

Now, good luck at 1 o'clock Eastern, 12 o'clock Central on a Sunday when nine games are happening, making sure that all of the mistakes are being cleaned up.

But in standalone games, where there's only one game in a primetime window, it makes it a lot easier to fix the kind of thing that could create a big mess for the NFL.

Well, and you're hitting the nail right on the head.

At a time when they should be taking multiple steps forward, they're going to take one giant leap backward by entrusting the most important function on game day to a bunch of low-level college and high school officials.

They don't get the higher-level college officials because those folks who aspire to become NFL officials will be branded as scabs, and that creates morale issues down the road as those people make their way into the NFL.

But when you consider the fail-merry play from that Packers-Seahawks Monday night game, Week 3, 2012, that broke the lockout, that got the NFL to finally bend enough to solve this problem, think of what the reaction to that game would be today.

in an age of hey everybody pick up your phone and make a bet it would be what happened in 2012 times a thousand and i don't get the impression that they're nearly as concerned about making the officiating better

at a time when it needs to be better.

Now, the PR battle has already begun between the league and the officials union, and the officials union, as it typically does, is doing a very poor job of engaging the NFL on the PR front.

I just got off of a media call where they're talking about these proposals, and Jeff Miller, the head of PR, was saying, we've been trying for two years.

We've been trying to improve officiating.