LAST EDITED ON 10-04-12 AT 10:54 AM (EST)

I hate to bring up the replacement refs again, but I should make one point. In Boston, the first game of the regular season was against Tennessee. The game was actually fairly well refereed, and I thought at the time that things had come out far better than anyone expected. The next two weeks, though, the refereeing in the Patriots' games was horrific, and it was obvious that the NFL had made a huge blunder.

That background is relevant because in the current issue of Time magazine is an interview with the replacement ref who was the crew chief for the New England-Tennessee game -- the only OK-refereed game I saw during the strike. His comments are interesting to me, and hopefully to the rest of you. Time published an edited version of the interview, but it also posted an unedited version on its web site, and that's what this link leads to:

http://keepingscore.blogs.time.com/2012/09/28/my-life-as-a-replacement-ref-three-unlikely-months-inside-the-nfl/