Tom Pelissero

USA TODAY Sports

Scott Green didn’t want to get into suggestions for Dean Blandino’s replacement.

But Green – the former NFL referee who’s now executive director of the NFL Referees Association – hopes the league’s next head of officiating has experience Blandino didn’t.

“We definitely would like to see someone who’s been in the NFL, on the field, and understands what it’s like to be out there and what our members go through on a weekly basis,” Green told USA TODAY Sports on Friday, hours after the NFL’s surprising announcement that Blandino had resigned as senior vice president of officiating.

Blandino, who’s expected to enter broadcasting, was promoted in February 2013 after 15 years in the NFL’s officiating department. He’d also been an instant replay official and director of the league’s instant replay program. But he’d never called a game on the field.

That sometimes was a sore spot for current and former officials, including Green, who wrote an op-ed for USA TODAY in 2015 that noted Blandino’s “view and understanding of the game and its officiating are exclusively through video, which is a far cry from being on-field with 22 large, fast and extremely skilled players colliding for three hours.”

NFL head of officiating Dean Blandino resigns

Green acknowledged Friday that losing Blandino’s expertise in replay could cause issues, particularly as the NFL moves to a centralized replay system – one that in essence had existed for a couple years, with Blandino as the primary voice providing instruction from headquarters in New York to the referee about the correct call to make on review.

However, Green said hiring a former official to the post Blandino will leave next month would make a difference in terms of “understanding the relationship to the membership.

“Dean worked hard to try to make that happen. As far as rules and video, he was on top of the game. But there’s always something about having been on the field, and when you’re talking about changing rules or making some mechanic changes – how we operate on the field – it really helps to have been out there, to know what that impact’s going to be.”

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