Art McNally

It is a great honor that finally an official, who has done a lot for the game in the NFL, has made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Art McNally will be enshrined in the summer of 2022 and man did this guy ever deserve to be in the museum of football's best.

When major professional organizations and museums make monumental statements about someone, you know they must be important. The Pro Football Hall of Fame calls Art McNally the "Father of Modern Officiating." Quite a high honor indeed. The NFL and the powers that be thought so much of the famous zebra that they tabbed him for enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2022, making him the first on-field official to have ever been inducted. To put that into perspective, the MLB placed their first Umpire in Cooperstown in 1953; hockey placed one of their officials in the HOF in 1963, and pro basketball was in 1959.

Who was Art McNally

Arthur Ignatius "Art" McNally was a former director of officiating for the National Football League from 1968 to 1991. Before he took that post, McNally toiled in the trenches and served as a field judge and referee in the NFL for nine years from 1959 to 1967. Mr. McNally started the very first program to train and evaluate game officials in professional sports. He took the steps he knew were needed to make the judges of rules on the field to be as professional as the players playing the game. McNally wound up overseeing a department of five people directing 112 game officials and in charge of scouting, screening, hiring, and grading crews working each NFL game. This was unheard of at the time, but it helped take the NFL to a whole new level and separate it from other professional sports.
Art's background was in teaching as he was an educator in Philadelphia and soon took an avid interest in officiating local Philly sandlot and high school games in the sports of basketball, football, and baseball. This soon expanded to the collegiate levels of the games. When Art found that the NFL was looking for a few good people, he tried his hand and made it. He spent 58 years working for the League in some sort of officiating capacity, all the way until 2015, when, at the age of 90, he stepped down in retirement. Now, that is a career of dedication!
Former Referee Jerry Markbreit has made statements that no one was better to work with or for than McNally, saying Art was; "The finest director of officiating by far."

Jim Tunney said in the Montery Herald story;

"That was his manner in working with every game official. He was also that way with angry and excitable coaches who called every Monday morning. With most of NFL games on Sunday, early Monday morning had to be McNally’s worst nightmare. He would take the train from his Pennsylvania home early Monday morning to the NFL office on Park Avenue in New York City. As he walked into the office, the phone was ringing with a coach who thought he got screwed by an official’s “bad” call. McNally’s demeanor was calm."

Accomplishments of McNally

Think about what Art McNally helped guide NFL officiating through. He introduced wireless microphones to help officials explain calls, added a seventh official to crews, and oversaw the creation of the illegal contact rule to help level the playing field between DBs and receivers. One of his biggest accomplishments was that he approved the use of instant replay as an officiating tool and even served as the first replay official in a Super Bowl.

He was part of the most famous play in football history, the Immaculate Reception. The extra point attempt by the Steelers, after Franco Harris's remarkable catch and score, was delayed even further as Referee Fred Swearingen left the field to go into the Pittsburgh Pirates dugout and made a call to the NFL's Supervisor of Officials, Art McNally to talk about who knows what. Some claim that McNally used replay, for the first time in NFL history, to help Swearingen determine a ruling on the play. McNally insisted that instant replay was not a factor and that all he did was encourage Swearingen to make his call. 

That is what Art McNally did: encourage and push officials and NFL officiating to improve to new heights. And now he will be remembered forever with his bronze bust in Canton in the summer of 2022.

The banner photo is of one of the Canton Eleven, monuments to Pro Football. It is a painting of the AFL and NFL Merger with the Lombardi Trophy and Pete Rozelle pictured in downtown Canton, Ohio painted on the side of a building.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: On This Day Sports, the Sports Reference's family of website databases & Stathead.com