I remember when he said it last year and I think there was a good discussion on in here, though maybe buried in a gamethread or something.Pereira, who I always thought of as a toadie, is now hypothesizing that on-field officials are receiving advice from replay officials through their headphones in violation of league rules. That's how many scandals this week?
http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/mike-pereira-nfl-breaking-its-own-rules-says-refs-getting-illegal-advice-on-headsets/
I wouldn't be surprised at all. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if New York is watching the game broadcast. The league doesn't really care about fairness. It cares about perceptions of fairness. If Chris Collinsworth says emphatically it's short of a first down to 10 million people, then I'm sure the NFL is plenty happy to just go with it.
My concern isn't the one articulated by Pereira here. He treats it as though it would be a technical violation of the rules, so long as they "get it right." My concern is anything that takes the ultimate decision away from the refs on the field. If you've ever met a high level ref in any sport, you know one thing -- they truly don't give a shit who wins. Truly. It's burned into them for years like religion before they ever get a whiff of those kinds of jobs. Sure, they are influenced by all sorts of things -- the emotions of a home field crowd, lobbying by coaches or players, whatever. And sometimes I'm sure that affects things, but in the end they just don't care who wins the game. To the NFL's credit, the hoops they make their refs jump through are very demanding -- their lives are an open book, financially, personally, and every other way. They undergo background checks similar to highly sensitive government jobs.
The league guy sitting in New York? Not so much. Left to its own devices, the NFL would probably turn into the WWE if they could sell it. Refs have always been the buffer. If they want to start putting actual NFL refs in the replay booth, like they do in baseball, or if they want to relegate replay to truly binary yes/no decisions with objective standards like hockey, then fine. Otherwise, removing the buffer is terrible. At least Riveron was a ref at one point, but he's now a company man. Blandino has never been an on-field ref, and his job duties are definitely blurred within the league, and he's definitely not subject to the same standards and expectations as the on-field refs.