The NFL yesterday promoted three execs to handle the duties previously handled by Dean Blandino, who left the league last month, but it will be Senior VP/Officiating Alberto Riveron who will be the "public voice and face of NFL officiating," according to Mike Florio of PRO FOOTBALL TALK. The public-facing role is a "critically important aspect of the job, requiring rules and their application and interpretation to be explained in a variety of settings, from appearances on NFL Network to the valuable in-season weekly officiating video to interviews with independent outlets." Whether Riveron is "viewed as thriving" in his position will "depend in large part on whether he becomes an authoritative and trusted resource for calls gotten right and calls gotten wrong" (PROFOOTBALLTALK.com, 5/10). In Cleveland, Matt Gould notes Riveron became the NFL's first Hispanic referee in '08. He has been with the league since '04. The move to Riveron comes after the NFL "announced this off-season replays will be centralized" to the league office in N.Y. Among the other promotions, new NFL VP/Instant Replay & Administration Russell Yurk will "direct instant replay operations," while Wayne Mackie was named VP/Officiating Evaluation & Development (Cleveland PLAIN DEALER, 5/11).
TRUST FACTOR: THE MMQB's Albert Breer writes the good news is Riveron, Yurk and Mackie all have "extensive field experience." A league source said that Yurk "'basically wrote the manual' on replay and spent the last seven years as a replay official." Beyond that, the "hope here is that beefing up the power structure will help in creating more consistency across the board, and in better managing the busy early window on Sundays." Riveron, like Blandino, will be "tasked with building the public trust" (MMQB.SI.com, 5/11). Florio said of Riveron's hiring, "Any time we hear about the NFL's concerns of the integrity of the game, added to that is public confidence in the sport of professional football. Whether or not the fans believe that the officials are competent and whether or not those charged with explaining good calls, bad calls, close calls, any calls of note to the media and to the fans, that is a ... critically important function and that will be one of Alberto Riveron’s duties. That means appearances on NFL Network’s 'NFL Total Access' to discuss big calls from over the weekend, that includes a very valuable weekly officiating video for the purposes of the media to digest and understand and communicate to its audience the various calls that were made and weren't made from the prior week. ... You have to be someone that can be trusted and the fans who have questions and concerns need to come away from those discussions saying, ‘I understand and I get it, and this isn't just somebody circling the wagons or covering up a mistake'" ("PFT," NBCSN, 5/11).
ASSISTANCE NEEDED: SPORTING NEWS' David Steele wrote the NFL made it clear yesterday that, for all the "raw sewage dumped on Blandino non-stop for four years," he had "shouldered an enormous weight on behalf of the league and its ever-growing tangle of rule changes and enforcement." The weight was "so great that in replacing Blandino," the NFL "split his old job among three people." Riveron comes with referee credentials that Blandino lacked, and "thus were often used against him when a situation went sideways." But how much Riveron's past as a ref "helps his credibility when he’s in front of the camera or on the record remains to be seen" (SPORTINGNEWS.com, 5/10). ESPN.com's Kevin Seifert writes, "Quite simply, the job got too big for one person to execute on a granular level." That was clear in March, when owners "approved the shift of replay decisions" from the ref to the officiating department's N.Y. command center. The job would "require huge responsibilities around a variety of platforms, from replay engagement for all 256 games of the season, to weekly communication with coaches, to supervising and evaluating 122 officials, to advancing a plan to hire full-time referees." That is "difficult from a time perspective, but more importantly as it relates to expertise" (ESPN.com, 5/11).
