Man, thinking about Joe Crawford, the ref, always gets my brain spinning. It’s not even always about agreeing or disagreeing with his calls, you know? It’s just the… intensity, the whole show.
I remember this one time, a while back, I decided I was gonna really try and understand his style. Like, properly. My own little project. I figured, there’s gotta be some kind of pattern, right? Some underlying logic to how he called games, especially the really controversial ones. So, I got ahold of some old game footage, focused on a few specific games where he was right in the thick of it.
My big plan was to watch, take notes, and see if I could crack the code. I sat down, fired up the videos, pen and paper ready. I was serious about this. I spent hours rewinding, watching plays in slow motion, trying to see what he saw. What made him blow the whistle there, but not here? It was my little ref-study session.
The more I dug in, though, the more it felt like I was chasing smoke. One game, a certain kind of contact was a foul every single time. Next game, or even later in the same game, similar contact, nothing. Or a completely different call. It started to feel less like a science and more like… well, just a feeling he had in the moment. At least, that’s how it looked from my couch.
And you know what that reminded me of?
It threw me right back to this old job I had. Not in sports, nothing like that. It was a small tech company, and the boss, bless his heart, he was a character. Full of big ideas, always energetic. But getting a straight, consistent direction from him? That was like trying to predict a Crawford tech.
One Monday, he’d come in all fired up: “Team, we need to drop everything and focus 100% on this new feature! This is the future!” So, we’d all scramble, rejig our plans, start burning the midnight oil on this new, urgent thing. Then, Wednesday, he’d be like, “Why is no one working on the stability issues for Project X? That’s our bread and butter! The new feature can wait!”
It was whiplash, man. My “practice” there was trying to build some kind of mental model of his decision-making. I’d try to anticipate. I’d make charts. I’d try to read between the lines of emails. We had a few different ways we were supposed to track our work too:
- There was the official project management software, which was mostly for show, I think.
- Then there were these shared documents that kept changing.
- And, of course, the verbal drive-by assignments that were super urgent until the next one came along.
So, trying to make sense of those Joe Crawford games, that whole exercise, it just brought back all those feelings from that job. That feeling of trying super hard to understand the rules, to find the consistency, only to realize that maybe the rules were just… flexible. Or maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to see the grand plan.
I eventually kinda gave up on my deep Joe Crawford analysis project. I figured, sometimes you just gotta watch the game and yell at the screen like everyone else. And that old job? Yeah, I moved on from that too. Found a place where things were a bit more straightforward. It’s funny, isn’t it? Sometimes trying to figure out one thing, like a ref, ends up teaching you something completely different about your own life.
