The NFL has turned a few of its Officials into full-time employees so that they can figure out if it matters if these guys will do better work as full-time employees. They have not converted all their officials to full-time, but they have chosen to keep some of them as full-time staff to see if they can perform better. The obvious answer is that they will do better, but we can give the NFL credit for trying it to see what will happen.
The romance of it all
It was once very romantic and exciting to look at a guy calling an NFL game and find out that he was a lawyer or a doctor or something like that.
That was nice to learn as a kid, and you do not think that the people on the field will be less effective because they have two jobs. The game was not as fast in the good old days as it is now, and these officials must be training for their jobs at all times. They should be allowed to live where they live, and they should be trained to do their job every day of the year. The guy who is thinking about that trial he has to show up for on Monday morning cannot be as effective as an official who has nothing else to do.
Arrogance
The NFL has been arrogant in thinking that they can have better officiating just because they are the superior league. They have pushed a lot of people away with their arrogant handling of player conduct policies, and they have been arrogant in thinking that their officials are automatically good.
The person who is only focused one job does better work than someone who has two jobs. The NFL is finally experimenting with something that every other league in the world figured out decades ago, but at least they have finally figured this out for themselves.
Bad calls
Some of the most memorable plays in the history of the league are bad calls by officials.
There is the tuck rule game, and there is the catch by Golden Tate. Dez Bryant has been in the middle of a call that seemed questionable, and we are still talking about these calls to this day. The league has made itself look terrible time and again because they are not willing to prioritize their officiating. We know too many names of officials because they have done bad jobs, and we should not have the fear that the officials will ruin the game simply due to carelessness.
It should work
It should work because it would be obvious that an official would perform better because they were full-time. We will not know until they send out their results, and this may improve the league a lot.