Saturday was the conclusion of the second season in college football. Spring practice ended at most Division I and II schools in the state over the weekend, and fans now have to sit tight until fall practice in August.

Those games, and the scrimmages leading up to them, kept many college football officials busy for a couple of months.

Generally speaking, a full crew of officials worked each of those spring games, but the usual custom was for the official who coordinates assignments for each team’s scrimmages to assign several extra officials for that spring game so younger officials might fill in and get to work some with the big guys.

This allows the coordinator and other seasoned officials to evaluate the work of younger officials and to offer constructive advice.

Many, if not most, officials who make it onto the rosters of the stronger football conferences got their early baptism of fire officiating preseason and spring practice scrimmages and games.

Those fans fortunate enough to see one of the spring games or to see the game statistics in a newspaper probably noted the unusually small number of enforced penalties.

In a few cases during spring games, coaches remain on the field with the teams, calling plays, whistling plays dead and controlling the action. Those coaches will have the officials flag violations and fouls, but instead of marking off penalties, they’ll just rerun the same play.

I expect that was the case at Starkville Saturday, because the team issued no official statistics and did not keep score. Ole Miss, Southern, Jackson State, and Delta State appeared to play their spring games under more nearly game-like conditions.

Most major college coaches do not have live kick-off and punt coverage during the spring to avoid unnecessary injuries.

I remember when Rocky Felker was coaching at Mississippi State. He would allow walk-ons to cover punts and kickoffs during the spring, but since there was no contact, all the guys did was run down the field and over to the bench.

As examples of the paucity of enforced penalties in this year’s spring games, the Red-Blue game at Ole Miss had three penalties for 25 yards called against each team. In the Black-Gold game at USM, each side was flagged once for 5 yards.

State did not keep statistics. Jackson State’s White vs. Blue contest had slightly more active officiating, as the White team was penalized four times for 35 yards and the Blue team three times for 41 yards.

The crew working the game at Delta State penalized the losing Green team five times for 54 yards, but the victorious White team was flagged only a single time for 7 yards.

A summary of the results from the reader’s survey I ran a few weeks ago shows most readers are interested in high school and college sports and most prefer football, basketball and baseball, in that order.

A few are participants, but most listed themselves as fans, and male respondents over 21 outnumbered all others although there were responses from a whole spectrum of readers.

Thanks. And that’s official.

Al Graning is a former SEC official and former Natchez resident. He can be reached at

AlanWard39157@aol.com.