Personal Foul: Ignorance

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love football. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable on the subject, whether discussing history, teams, players, strategy or rules. Apparently I need some more study of the latter.

Today I took the USA Football NCAA official's qualifying test. Its 100 questions, multiple choice, and apparently all NCAA refs need to pass it each year. About half the questions have only 2 answers, and the remainder have 3-4 possible answers. This means that by guessing randomly you would expect a score below 50 but you would still get a handful correct. Thinking I was pretty sharp on the rules of my favorite game, I confidently clicked the link and took this challenge head on.

55. Out of 100. Thats 45 incorrect. Keep in mind that during a real game, the officials don't have the answers in front of them but must go from memory. Knowing that they have to pass this thing almost gives me respect for officials.

In my defense, the test is a monster. Not just the mind numbing length, but the questions are really complicated and they bring up a lot of crazy situations which I'm pretty sure have never happened in a game. A sample question might read:

Team A has the ball on Team B's 47 yard line, 2nd & 8. Its the 3rd quarter of a non-conference game between teams who each covered the spread last week. Team A is ranked # 15 in the AP and #17 in the ESPN/Coaches poll. Team B is unranked. Both teams have animal mascots and bands with less than 300 members. Team A's quarterback throws a complete pass to the tight end at B's 21 yard line, and then he fumbles. The ball is recovered by B's linebacker and advanced to A's 6 yard line where he is tackled by A's running back, who made the tackle by grabbing and twisting the facemask. Prior to the fumble team B's defensive back hit team A's wide reciever above the waist at Team B's 44 yard line. During the return Team B's defensive end committed a block in the back at A's 27 yard line, and B's cheerleaders performed a flying basket toss. Ruling? Clock?

A) A's ball on B's 44, 2/15, Clock starts on ready for play whistle.
B) B's ball on A's 49, 1/10, clock starts on snap.
C) How hot are the cheerleaders?

And then the next three questions will be all variations of the same setup with a small but very important difference added.

I take a little solace in the fact that I'm apparently not alone in my ignorance of the minutia of football rules. Orson Swindle, the writer of EDSBS, a wonderful college football blog where I first learned of the test, scored a 55 himself. And several other bloggers and journalists have also taken the test and none have reported a score higher than that. So maybe I'm the smartest of the college football loving bloggers, which you could probably equate to being the tallest munchkin in OZ.