NFL = No Fun League

^ Motor, the league is trying to protect its referees from abuse or worse. Once team owners and officials start treating refs with disdain and derision, it invites some of their loonier fans to do the same. The last thing that we need is for crazy town fans to wait outside of a stadium for the refs to emerge when they think that a bad call cost their team the game.

Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta used to have the referees' dressing room with a conventional sign, with REFEREES in Braille right under the normally visible letters.😂😎

That's a good observation, rickdugan.
However, it would not be the fault of an NFL exec wearing a mocking ref costume, if some yahoo hurt a ref. The perps are responsible for the things they perpetrate.

Rick -

I totally get your point. I was a baseball and softball umpire for years, officiating girls softball at the state tournament level - so I am very sympathetic towards referees and umpires.

The recent wave of attacks on umpires and officials is sickening to me.

Good point you made

^ This is the problem in our society, it's in our politics, it's everywhere, tribes act out with other like minded folks, they genuinely believe they have the right to commit these lone wolf acts because of the feedback, but in the end each individual is responsible for their own actions, hurting a ref, attacking an old man because you don't like his wife's politics, the volume is all the way up, cheering is taking place by many, and it's loud. Makes delusional folks think they are the hero of the moment, but in reality it's sick and we need to cut this sort of stuff out.
I don't blame the NFL for acting to prevent another possible tragedy, you shouldn't either.
That's not me saying, that the blame doesn't lie with the perpetrator of these random acts of violence, I'm just pointing out where the fuel is coming from to feed this fire.

===> "However, it would not be the fault of an NFL exec wearing a mocking ref costume, if some yahoo hurt a ref. The perps are responsible for the things they perpetrate."

In theory I agree 100%. People are responsible for their own actions. But as we know all too well, there are always loonies out there looking for an excuse to act on their base impulses. Just look at the BLM riots and looting in the Summer of 2020. Or the fucking morons who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6 2021.

Almost every large group of supporters will have its fringe element of lunatics who are so emotionally invested that they can be triggered into throwing out reason and doing something stupid. Sure they may be prosecuted after the fact, but that doesn't help the targets of that behavior in the moment. For this reason, it's important for those at the top to set the right tone. So if an NFL owner starts ridiculing refs, the League has no choice but to quickly smack him on the nose like a stupid dog who shit on the carpet when he should have known better.

Issuing a fine over a blind ref costume at Halloween is a bit much for me. I get wanting to protect refs and I could see a fine if he went as a beat up and bruised ref, a ref with a target on his back, made it clear he was a particular blind ref to get back at someone or something like that, but calling refs blind is nothing new. If someone was deciding if they were going to beat up a ref over bad calls I doubt Jerry Jones costume would be the straw that broke the camel's back.

With that said, the NFL is a business that goes to great measures to "protect the integrity of the sheild" so I am not surprised and it isn't like Jerry Jones will miss the money at all.

===> "but calling refs blind is nothing new."

Whodey, an NFL owner doing it certainly is and it's unacceptable. All it takes is one or a few crazy ass fan(s) to get wound up while they sit there thinking "Jerry's right. Those fucking refs keep screwing us! Someone needs to do something about it!" for shit to go downhill in a hurry. A team owner has to be better than that.