The morning after Dad’s last game, I made the ultimate sportswriter misstep. I opened ESPN.com, clicked on my story “A Day with the BCS Refs,” and scrolled down into the comments section. This was the first sentence that I read:
“Of course this idiot would write something nice about these referee idiots. His last name is the same as the field judge. It’s his damn dad. Refs suck.”
In the years since Dad’s last game, I have written about him often. I have talked about him even more. I’ve done it so much that it has become a running joke with my ESPN college football coworkers. “Hey, Ryan, your dad was a ref? Wow! You’ve never mentioned that!”
But why wouldn’t I? I now have the opportunity to cover college football, the very dream that was ignited on the sideline at Virginia in 1983, and my perspective on the game, which I believe to be unique, comes directly from my officiating bloodline. As a result, it will always be my ongoing mission to humanize officials, to try and help sports fans develop a better understanding of that third team on the field. People don’t have to like officials. Most never will, and I know that. However, I honestly believe they can be smarter football fans if they have a better understanding of the men and women who blow their whistles not just on autumn weekends, but in every sport at every level.
Heck, that’s why this book you currently hold in your hands exists!
Sam
I have seen firsthand that watching the officials in addition to the teams makes the game more interesting; I have seen that happen with my friends who started watching Dad because I made them. I know I probably drove them crazy with it in the beginning, but then one of them might say, “Man, your dad was all over that pass downfield,” and that feels like a win.
But we aren’t naïve here. We know there will always be way more people booing the officials or making fun of them than paying attention to them or respecting them, especially now.
In 2006, I wrote a two-page “Total Access” photo spread for ESPN The Magazine, taking a photographer behind the scenes with Dad’s crew for a Maryland-Virginia game in Charlottesville. The experience was amazing. I was back on the sideline at UVA, not as a kid with my camera from Santa Claus, but with Les Stone, an award-winning, globe-trotting photographer who made his name as one of the planet’s preeminent eyes for capturing the horrors of war. Les, attending his first college football game, had an incredible time as we watched Dad’s crew meet, warm up, officiate a track meet of an offensive game, and then give Dad’s old friend Clark Gaston the game ball for his 275th and final time on the field.
Les sent the images back to the magazine headquarters in New York. I was convinced this would be the kind of insider piece that would change the minds of millions of readers about the men they booed every Saturday. Then my editor called. I was sure he was going to heap praise upon me and tell me how I had forever altered his view of the men and women in stripes.
“Dude, we’re going to lead with a big photo of two refs stretching their quads like they are about to play in the game or something. It’s hilarious.”
Dad
Down at Clemson one day, I was running off the field with Dr. Ernie Benson, a groundbreaking HBCU educator, and another official who was an attorney. Between us we had nine college degrees. This ol’ boy in a Pabst Blue Ribbon hat who had about three teeth, he shook a beer at us and yelled, “Y’all’s the three dumbest sumbitches ever been down here!”
You know what? We’re probably never going to convince that guy that officials are actually pretty smart people who love football even more than he does. And that’s okay.
But that doesn’t mean we will stop trying.
Remember that “Hey Ref!” Q&A a few chapters back? For several years, Dad and I fielded questions from readers like that, and they seemed to like it. At that same time, I pitched a “Zebra Report” series for ESPN.com Insider, where I would call officials, many of whom I’d known for years and years, and they would give me “anonymous official” scouting reports on teams playing in big upcoming games. For example, a “Big East Head Linesman” provided a fantastic bit of info on West Virginia, then coached by Red Bull–guzzling, crazy-haired head coach Dana Holgorsen. The official explained there was always one stretch during every game when the WVU sideline would descend into chaos, with coaches yelling and players seemingly lost. He said that if an opponent were to recognize when that sideline inevitability was taking place, that window was the time to strike on offense.
Based on the reaction and page views, people seemed to really like that series. The teams, it turned out, didn’t much care for it, particularly the folks in West by-god Virginia.
I believe the phone call from Doug Rhoads went something like this: “Ryan, Doug Rhoads here. I just left our national officiating coordinators meeting, and we talked about you for 45 minutes. Some coaches have complained about our guys talking to you about their guys. You know, I was a journalism major, so I love the idea. And we do look smart as hell. But you need to know that new regulations are being put into place stating that officials can no longer talk directly to the media without permission from the coordinators. So…good job.”
That was almost a decade ago. Even now, I still run into officials in airports and they start laughing and running away from me. “No! I can’t violate the Ryan McGee Rule!”
Dad
Yeah, Ryan got a little too specific on those. But the information was good. Otherwise, the coaches wouldn’t have been so mad about it.
So, instead of aiming for mass audience officiating education, we are back to where we stared, trying to teach the public—and my press box colleagues—one officiating-hater at a time. And even though we can’t be at games together very often, the game day text chains between me, Dad, and Sam remain a fall Saturday constant.
When I am covering a big college football game and there is a question about a downfield play—in or out of bounds, catch or no catch, pass interference or not—several of my fellow writers will instinctively look over to me and ask, “Well, what’s your Dad say?” Within seconds, even without my asking, the text will arrive from Pops and I will announce to my row, “Dad says no way on that DPI!”
Sam
That’s just how we watch football, and it will always be how we watch football.
One year, my alma mater, Wake Forest, made it to the Orange Bowl, and I took my wife down to Miami. Our seats were awful. If you ever see the huge Jumbotron in the upper deck at Dolphin Stadium, my back was resting up against that. We were as far away from the field as we could possibly be and still be inside the stadium.
Right before one play I started screaming from the top row, “Louisville has 12 men on the field! Louisville has 12 men on the field!” The flag was thrown and the PA announcer says, “Penalty, Louisville, substitution infraction, 12 men on the field.”
I looked over at this guy who was staring at me. He said, “Wait, do you count the number of players on the field on every play?”
I said, “Of course I do. Don’t you?”
To this point we’ve shared with you so many of the officiating questions Dad receives on a regular basis. But what about the question Sam and I hear the most? We get it from friends, from family, and we’ve always really gotten it from Dad’s friends in stripes.
Why didn’t we follow in Dad’s cleat steps and become college football officials, too?
Sam
When I was a young man and grinding as a young attorney, people would ask me that question. I always said, “I have a very stressful job, the last thing I need is people yelling at me on the weekend.” Or, “Why I would walk into a pressure cooker situation on the weekend? I’m already getting that all week.”
My line always was, “Nobody yells at me when I’m fishing.”
But here’s the problem. Here’s what I didn’t get. The genius of this hobby for Dad was that it was a command performance. He had to be there. So, he could never say, “I’m too busy for my hobby.”
Well, I have been too busy to fish most of my adult life. So, part of me says that if I had gone into officiating football when I was in my early twenties, like Dad did, it would have forced me to make sure that my hobby, something I was really passionate about, didn’t get pushed to the side.
My wife, Marci, has told me before that I should have done it. I think she understands, like Ryan’s wife, Erica, does, that we do have that real love for it.
Back in the day, Dad used to mention it every once in while. He felt like I could really see what happened on the field. And I know that was 100 percent because I was watching games through the lens of an official at a very early age.
Dad
We did talk about it. I always thought Sam had a tremendous sense of what was happening on the field. He had that ability to see the whole field. I think I knew that going all the way back to when he would be waiting for me when I got home from a game, with his sheet of paper and those three or four plays he questions about. But that’s also how he made it into Yale Law and became an incredible attorney, because he approaches everything in his life like that.
I’m not disappointed that neither one of the boys became football officials. I’d say it’s all worked out pretty well.
I never had that officiating conversation with Dad. Despite my deep appreciation for officiating, I never even considered doing it. From that very first time I snuck into the tower at Carter–Finley Stadium during an NC State scrimmage, it was the press box that was calling to me. Thankfully, my career path was established at a young age. It already had me fulfilling my childhood “How do I get paid to do this?!” sideline dreams.
Besides, if there were any doubts in my head as to whether or not I’d made the right football decision, they were silenced on March 31, 2018. That’s when the SEC Network asked me to be the field judge in South Carolina’s Garnet versus Black spring game.
There I was, on the same Williams-Brice Stadium sideline featured on Dad’s Wall of Screaming. I wasn’t receiving an earful from Joe Morrison or a face-in-the-hands reception from Lou Holtz. Instead, I had Gamecocks head coach Will Muschamp jawing at me. “We’ve got the wrong McGee out here! Where’s your dad?!” Instead of me and Sam watching Dad on TV, they were watching me. Instead of me sitting in the stands with my Mom, my daughter Tara was there with her mom. And instead of Mom hoping her husband wouldn’t be run over by an All-Conference linebacker, my wife, Erica, was the one doing the worrying.
Honestly, I thought it wasn’t going to be that hard. I mean, c’mon, I’d been on sidelines since I was 13. I had always been there to shadow the field judge, and that was exactly the position that SEC officiating coordinator Steve Shaw made sure I was in now. How big of a difference could there really be standing on my regular side of the sideline as opposed to Dad’s? What was it, six feet? It might as well have been half a mile. Only a few steps forward, onto the green grass, and I found that everything moved into warp speed.
I had one great moment, when recently retired head coach Steve Spurrier snuck onto the field to catch a pass from the South Carolina team, whom he’d been coaching the year before. But when the pass was behind him, the Head Ball Coach lost his footing and flopped right onto his back, the ball landing in the grass by his head. I ran over and asked, “Coach, you okay?” When he said yes, I pulled my flag off my belt and tossed it onto the turf next to him.
“What was that for?!” he asked me as he stood up and brushed himself off.
“That was for that bulls--t you yelled at my father during the ’98 Citrus Bowl against Penn State!”
I also had one not-so-great moment. Okay, I had a few. But the big one was, naturally, a bang-bang touchdown catch right over the front corner end zone pylon, just like Dad’s calls in the ’97 Rose Bowl and ’85 Citrus Bowl. The pass came right at me; the defender and receiver flew across my feet. I got totally turned around, and when I rallied, I realized that I had committed the ultimate field judge sin. I let the play get behind me. However, I was very proud of the fact that my feet were still in the right place, right on the goal line.
I signaled touchdown. Unfortunately, it was not a touchdown. Also, my feet were totally not at the goal line, as I had believed they were. They were at the 3-yard line. My real-life counterpart was Blake Parks, a longtime SEC field judge and a great guy. If I’d been paid a dollar for every time Blake had to say to me, “Back up!” or “No, straddle that goal line!” or “Get the spot, get the spot, get the spot!” I could have bought a skybox at Williams-Brice Stadium.
After the game, the sufficiently crusty SEC evaluator, NFL veteran Larry Rose, showed that play back to the entire crew, our ESPN media members as well as our SEC counterparts. He said, “Ryan McGee’s father was as mechanically sound as anyone who has ever worn this uniform. But Ryan McGee made more positioning mistakes in one afternoon than his father made in the entire decade of the 1990s.”
It was an insanely fun day. It was a dream come true. But if it’s cool with y’all, I’m going to stay in my press box chair with my laptop, writing my words.
Sam
Ryan, how early do you get to the stadium when you are covering a game for ESPN?
I tell brother Sam that I walk into the gate as early as they will let me in there. Always.
Sam
Because that’s the best part, right? Whether I was a ball boy at Furman or going somewhere with Dad, getting into the stadium before everyone else, that was the best part. It felt just like when I was playing baseball. The smell of the fresh-cut grass. The pregame radio show is playing on the loudspeakers. The stands are empty. You are a part of it. You feel like you are a part of the game.
Dad
Exactly. I had the same feeling then that I did when I played baseball. My cleats on the concrete. The music playing. It was like those John Philip Sousa marches over the loudspeaker in Rockingham.
Every time I officiated a game, from high school to Pasadena, we always did the same thing. We got to the stadium hours before kickoff and the first thing we did was put down our bags and say, “Let’s go look at the field!”
We would walk around Death Valley at Clemson, and it would be 84,000 empty seats. There would be a couple of guys laying the lines for the sideline phones. The equipment guys would be setting up the bench area. Maybe someone was touching up the paint on the field just a little. There would be a half dozen people in the stadium, and us.
Then we would go into the locker room and get dressed, have a meeting, and when we came back out, now there are 84,000 people in there, and the bands are playing and the teams are warming up.
It’s crazy. It makes the hairs stand up my arm right now just talking about it.
The empty stadium conversation is taking place in the basement of my house in Charlotte. The table where we have just spent nearly two hours swapping stories is covered in empty pizza boxes, yellowed newspaper clippings (Academic makes calls on, off field), stacks of photos, and a couple of 30-year-old VHS tapes labeled in my teenaged handwriting.
We have retired to the television side of the room. I have YouTube fired back up and I’m riding the search bar. I dial up the 1985 Florida Citrus Bowl and find the touchdown play that still drives Dad nuts. Sam and I are comfortably reclined on couches, but Dad is on his feet, swaying back and forth. As the BYU receiver leaps toward the pylon past the outstretched arms of a Buckeyes defender, Dad leans in. The images are just as grainy as they were on our VCR in Raleigh, the play we watched and rewound over and over again. Like then, Dad is still sure he missed the call. And like then, Sam and I are still sure he got it right.
“You guys are mean, picking on your old man like this…”
Dad watches the film from ’85 and starts talking about how much the game of college football changed during his years on the field. He talks about the Wishbone offense giving way to the Fun ‘n’ Gun and the Spread. He speaks of stadiums with crowds of 15,000 fans drawing crowds five times that size. Film into HDTV. Crews of five guys, hydrating with beer and steak, giving way to eight-man teams using eating and drinking processes prescribed by sports medicine specialists. Officiating plays from six yards downfield…then 10…then 15…then 22…and 22 still didn’t seem far enough to keep the quickening plays in front of you. Motel rooms full of chicken feathers in Jefferson City, Tennessee, to a palatial Fort Lauderdale resort on the eve of the national championship game. Bo Jackson, Charlie Ward, Julius Peppers, and Tim Tebow. Joe Paterno, Bobby Bowden, Danny Ford, Vince Dooley…
“Dan Henning!” Sam interjects.
“Dan Henning!” Dad and I shout back.
The McGee Boys are watching college football together. We are laughing and we are smiling.
You will never see us look happier than we are right now.
Just like Mom said.