“I’m looking at the seven guys who are working in the Super Bowl, and to be quite honest, several of them should not be on the field,” Daopoulos said.

Michael Signora, a spokesman for the N.F.L., disputed that, writing in an e-mail, “There is no merit to the suggestion that Jerome Boger’s grades were treated differently from those of any other official.”

Signora added, “Claims to the contrary are both inaccurate and unfair.”

Still, some elements of the appointment seem strange. Ben Austro, the founder of FootballZebras.com, a Web site that focuses on news and analysis of officials in the N.F.L., first reported the Boger assignment several weeks ago. Austro said in an interview Monday that he was immediately struck by something unusual about the choice, noting that every official is graded by league observers following each game worked, with every call made being deemed correct or incorrect.

This season, according to Austro, there were approximately eight instances in which Boger was initially given what officials call a ding, or markdown, for a particular call, only to have those negative grades later overturned. In other words, Austro said, if Boger earned the best grades among referees this season, he did so with the help of significant after-the-fact revisions from those doing the grading.

Although it is not clear which grades were changed, Boger did have some unusual moments this season, most notably a sequence in Week 16 when he announced a penalty against Carolina quarterback Cam Newton for “bumping” him while protesting the officiating but did not eject Newton, as the rules require. Boger later said that he misspoke and that the penalty against Newton was only for “disrespectfully addressing” an official.