Everyone’s Blaming the NFL… But the Referees Are the Problem
It's not that the owners are cheap! It's that the refs are being a pain! And the owners are cheap.
I can’t believe I’m saying this… but the NFL owners are right—and the referees are the problem.
On the premiere episode of my new YouTube series Seattle Mike Investigates, I took a deep dive into the ongoing labor dispute between the big bad NFL and the underappreciated referees who just want to be paid their fair share from those corrupt billionaire scum that run our favorite professional sports league.
One little wrinkle—turns out the referees are every bit as responsible for this war as the NFL.
In case you missed it, the NFL is on the verge of turning to replacement referees for the 2026 season, as the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the league and the referee union is set to expire on the last day of May. Once that happens, the referees are locked out until a new CBA is signed.
And the league isn’t bluffing.
The NFL has already taken applications from Division I, II, and III college referees and approved a plan to commit hundreds of thousands of dollars to training and paying replacement refs through the end of the 2026 season.
Normally, these disputes come down to the owners being too cheap to shell out a few more bucks despite the unrivaled success of the product.
This situation is different.
In this week’s episode of The Twilight Zone—it’s the referees that are being greedy.
The primary complaint from the referees is simple: they want to be paid more. Per The Athletic, the NFL is offering a 6.45% annual raise over the next six years. The referees want more than a 10% increase year over year, hoping to bring their salaries closer to officials in the MLB and NBA.
That would make sense… if the jobs were even remotely comparable.
MLB umpires can work up to 184 games in a season.
NBA officials can work up to 110.
NFL referees?
And they want comparable pay?
Demanding similar salaries to officials who work four to eight times as many games doesn’t make a lot of sense—especially when NFL referees are technically part-time employees, while NBA and MLB officials are full-time.
So why not just make NFL refs full-time employees?
Good question.
Because the refs won’t agree to that!
The NFL is pushing for more offseason involvement—rule review, consistency training, accountability measures.
The refs don’t want that.
The NFL wants more retraining for poorly performing officials.
The refs don’t want that.
The NFL wants it to be easier to move on from referees who consistently miss calls.
The refs don’t want that.
The owners are actually pushing for something fans have been begging for—accountability.
And this is where it starts to matter to you.
Because if this falls apart, we’re getting replacement refs again. And we’ve already seen how that goes—blown calls, missed calls, and games decided by chaos instead of talent.
The referees want significantly more money without offering anything in return.
And I may have never graduated from business school…
but I’m pretty sure when a business pays more for a service, it expects something better—not the exact same product.
If the refs want to get paid like full-time professionals… they need to start acting like full-time professionals.