Al Riveron is leaving the league office.
Riveron, who was appointed the head of the officiating department in 2017 after Dean Blandino left for FOX, is retiring, according to Kevin Seifert of ESPN.
The NFL had already reduced Riveron’s load by giving more of the work to Walt Anderson and Perry Fewell, and now Anderson and Fewell will run the officiating department.
profootballtalk wrote:
After the NFL had two greats in Mike Pereira and Dean Blandino as heads of NFL officiating office. Greats because they would stand up against Goodell for the following the rule book.
We got the horrible Al Riveron, whom seemed to follow Goodells every wish, including (in my opinion) follow the NFL requests over the NFL rule book, where the Refs started calling the catch rule differently a full season before they changed the rule in the rule book...
And they have seemingly (again my opinion) purposely made the new rules more ambiguous, so that both the NFL can define the refs no matter what the call is, to suggest the ref was right and also to change the refs how to change calls mid-season (such as that Matthews sack that lead Vikings tied game was a penalty early in the season, but that same exact play wasn't a penalty in the second half of the season).
And I still can't believe that the Bills OL got fined for a completely legal hit in the playoff game which killed their drive and ended their season... the Ref had a horrible angle and from that angle it looked illegal, I don't blame the ref, from that bad angle he got it right. But I would assume the NFL fines review plays from muliple angles and from a better angle it was clearly legal... and they still fined the player and ironically the NFL I. The last year used the Bills OL play as an NFL ref example of what is legal! Yet they fined the player for it being illegal a couple years ago!
It will be interesting to see how Walt Anderson and Perry Fewell run things...
But bottom line, hopefully it's at least consistent reffing from game to game and follows the rule book!