Posted by ESPN.com's Graham Watson
WAC and Mountain West coaches can no longer complain about officials being biased because they won't know from which conference the officials hail.
For the second consecutive year, the WAC and Mountain West are using sets of officials made up from their conferences and the Big 12. Last season, a set consisted of three Big 12 officials, two WAC officials and two Mountain West officials. The conference will keep the same setup for this season, but add one more officiating set to the pool.
Also, the WAC and Mountain West have combined their entire officiating lists to create four crews strictly for the WAC and four sets for the Mountain West. Traditionally, there had been six crews of WAC officials officiating the WAC.
"The intent was that it wasn't a conference-identified crew, it was a football officiating crew," WAC commissioner Karl Benson said. "The goal is to eliminate the conference affiliation of the crews."
Benson said the eventual goal is to have a Western region officiating pool that incorporated the conferences in the West, including the Pac-10.
This offseason, the WAC, Mountain West and Big 12 have had joint officiating clinics to make sure all officials were on the same page.
"The goal is to standardize it to make sure games are being officiated in a consistent manner," Benson said. "It's a cooperative effort to establish an officiating system that is not connected to a conference."
Benson credits the supervisors of each conference for giving up the autonomy and creating an officiating system that is in the best interest of the game.
The new officiating system met with no resistance last season and Benson is hoping it will catch on with the other conferences.
"I'm not looking at this as an experiment," Benson said. "It's the wave of the future."
Watson joined ESPN.com in 2008 after four seasons covering the Missouri Tigers and the Big 12 Conference for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She also covered college football recruiting for the Dallas Morning News.
