See almost every CFO video.
What exactly is going to happen if officials start regularly flagging coaches? Are the coaches going to rise up and demand the commissioner get a new assigner? Each conference only has a couple bad apples - I would think the well-behaved coaches WANT the Matt Campbells of the world to be penalized. In basketball I have always been taught that if you let one coach get away with acting like an idiot, eventually the other coach is going to do the same thing even if he's normally a saint - especially if a couple calls start going the idiot's way.
While it is easy to understand why a rational person would think this, most experienced officials such as yourself know that coaching is like a brotherhood of doing no wrong. Rarely is a coach admonished by another coach, even when he's doing something clearly unfair or unethical. It literally blows my mind that coach A wants the game called in certain ways to benefit their team and while the coaches B-Z know this, B-Z don't seem to care because they believe that they will achieve their own advantage at some point themselves.
The only reason the OU coach wanted Campbell penalized is for the 15 yards it would have given him for THAT play. He DID NOT want Campbell penalized if it meant he had to live under the same parameters. Most of the other B12 coaches probably think the same way. Now, once they get on the rules committee and meet in a forum where minutes are taken and they are on the record, their views MIGHT change but we don't know what they say in private.
The other big consideration is what the conference commissions tell the supervisor of officials. Don't think for a second that the supervisor has the final (or, for that matter, a great deal of) say in the behavior of coaches. If the commission is going to get grief from any one or more of the school, the networks, fans, etc. they are going to tell the supervisor to tell the crews to back off enforcing whatever rules are being bitched about. After all, "no one shows up on Saturday to watch the officials."
The CORRECT answer to that is,
"Everyone shows up on Saturday expecting the rules to be enforced as written (within reason) and fairly." Except, of course, the fans, coaches, ADs, etc. when things don't go the way these people think they should go.
