Most start with three

Assuming that most officials start out at the youth or high school subvarsity level, most will be be working on either a 3- or 4-man crew. For this article, let's focus on the 3-man crew.

Make no mistake: The fundamental downside of the 3-man crew is that you've only 3 officials watching 22 players and generally one sideline is pretty much void of an official.

To illustrate, picture working as Linesman in a reserve game, and there were several long pass plays to the opposite sideline. A couple of them ended up being controversial because the receiver was airborne and there was some question whether he was inbounds or not.

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