NEVER GUESS:
Remember back if you will to your first year of officiating. For many of you, that won’t be hard because you haven’t been at it for too long. Recall if you will the first time you stood on the field and watched the ball be snapped. What you most likely saw was a jumble of bodies, without form, shape or mission. You found yourself studying the snap and the alignment of the players. Illegal motion and offside were the calls you could make with some certainty, but once the ball was snapped, you found it difficult to focus on individual players.

Don’t feel badly about it, those things happened to every one of us. Our careers advanced only at the rate that we learned to read keys properly, allowing us to anticipate individual acts and focus on them for the brief periods of time in which they occurred. Nothing to it.
A tendency of newer officials, and unfortunately a few veterans, is to look for illegal acts to call. If they don’t have a flag on the ground on a fairly regular basis, they feel they’re not doing their jobs. So they look for a foul; and if you look for a foul, you’re going to find one. What you find may or may not be illegal, and even if it’s illegal, it may not affect the play, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find a foul. How can you control a game if you don’t call fouls, right?

This leads to seeing the result of a player’s act, rather than the act itself. Possibly we even have a staff of coaches behind us who saw the same thing we saw – the result of one player’s play on another, and they begin to yell at us that a foul has occurred (holding is their favorite). We see that what happened must have been a foul, so, bingo!, there’s a flag on the ground. This is the famous phantom foul, and it will stall your career development faster than knee surgery.

Later on during our progression, when we’re learning to find those individual acts, we initially tend to see the tail end of them. When we see something that appears to be the end of an illegal act, we tend to assume that it was illegal from start to finish, and we throw the flag. When that happens, we just guessed it was a foul. Many times the call turns out to be correct, but it’s still wrong.

This is not a rule of thumb, it’s a rule of officiating; and it’s as true in swimming, bowling or badminton as it is in football. Never, never, never, never, never guess. Be certain that what you saw, from start to finish, is an illegal act.

This is a rule of thumb, and it will always serve you well in sports officiating – it is better to let an illegal act occur and play on than to guess on a call or make one up. Many times you will hear veteran officials say, “I never got in trouble for a call I didn’t make.” That saying works better in basketball than in football, but the principle remains the same. If you don’t see it all the way, don’t call it.

And after you see it all the way, before you throw your flag, pause long enough to ask yourself if it affected the play. If the act had no affect on the play, and/or was not dangerous or unsportsmanlike, you will eventually learn to keep your flag in your pocket.
The earlier in your career you learn the that what you pass on is as important as what you penalize, the quicker you will advance to the next plateau.