Approximately 20 miles from the site of the old Texas Stadium outside of Dallas are the fields where Steve Woods spent weekends officiating bantam league football games.
Geographically, the Franklin native was close to the National Football League, as the Dallas Cowboys played home games at Texas Stadium from 1971-2008. From a professional standpoint, Woods was universes away, honing his new hobby in virtual anonymity.
One extreme eventually gave way to the other.
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In 2017, not even two decades removed from his start, Woods is part of the officiating crew inside AT&T Stadium, the Cowboys’ expansive current venue, for the team’s Week 5 game against Green Bay. The Packers rally to win, 35-31, and Woods, an umpire, has no choice but to smile and shake his head regarding his good fortune.
“Getting to do a game there with Aaron Rodgers and Dak Prescott as the quarterbacks, it was very surreal,” Woods said of the matchup. “Just to think the journey had come full circle. I never thought when I started that I would be where I’m at.
“It was always an opportunity to be part of a team. We’re basically a third team out there. I grew up in athletics and enjoyed competing. This was a way for an older person to stay very active. You want to be the best and compete for postseason assignments.”
Woods, 47, will soon begin his third season as an NFL umpire, where his responsibility is to stand in the offensive backfield on all plays and look for any holding violations or illegal blocks. He counts all offensive players on the field before each snap.
The 1989 Franklin Community High School graduate, a former Grizzly Cubs football player and wrestler, thoroughly enjoyed every step that it took to make it to such a level.
Humble beginnings
Woods started his football officiating career at the bottom and worked his way up, rarely missing an opportunity to demonstrate his progress as a football official. Woods funded his own trips to officiating camps and clinics.
“You pay for everything. You pay for the clinic and you pay for your room,” Woods said. “That’s what you have to do to be seen. You want to get a lot of snaps and expand your network of officials. This is finally a hobby I get paid to do.”
Woods was a 1993 Wabash College graduate who started at center for the Little Giants football team. In 1999, he was employed at a sports marketing company in Dallas when two of his workout partners asked Woods if he had ever officiated football at any level.
Soon enough, Woods, then 28, was officiating bantam and Pop Warner games.
Woods moved back to his home state a year later, settling in Indianapolis. He and his wife, Shelese, and their three children have been living in Franklin since 2008. Woods eventually moved from officiating bantam games to high school games and then to working Division III college games.
“(Officiating) preceded my marriage, so she always knew that this is what I did,” Woods said. “She knew Friday night and Saturday morning until Saturday night were spoken for. She’s an attorney, so she would come back to the house, order some takeout food and watch a movie.
“When we had kids, it started making it a little more difficult. I was doing high school and small college until 2008. We had two kids at the time. When you move to Division I you don’t do high school (games) anymore, but you travel on that Friday night.”
Climbing the ladder
The same year he moved back to Franklin, Woods started calling Mid-American Conference football contests before making it to the Big Ten Conference in 2012. That meant working at some of the country’s largest and best-known stadiums and in front of some of the college football’s most ardent fan bases.
Once, after Woods worked a game at Ohio State, an older woman was unrelenting in her criticism as Woods and other members of his officiating crew ran up the tunnel to exit the stadium, get on their bus to leave.
“She had veins coming out of her neck, she’s flying both birds at me — and they won by three touchdowns,” Woods said.
Remaining in good cardiovascular shape is a must, so Woods takes three hour-long classes a week at JoCo CrossFit in Franklin, both in and out of season.
“I’m not sprinting out there, but you do move a lot,” Woods said. “There’s a lot of starting and stopping. I start 15 yards off the line of scrimmage, and I run at least 15 yards to reset the ball, so I’m covering 30 yards per play, at least.”
In mid-July, NFL officials find out which four preseason games they will work. Following the first preseason game, assignments are given for Week 1 of the regular season. Assignments are then announced weekly, giving officials four weeks advance notice of what games they will work and where.
Woods flies out for his assigned game at around 7 a.m. every Saturday. This allows him to be at the officiating crew’s meeting, which is usually that day at 2 p.m. This holds true even if Woods is working a game in such nearby cities as Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit or Nashville (Tennessee).
{&subleft}Both pressure and fun
“It has always been fun. Even if I hadn’t progressed, I would still be working games in the HCAC just because it’s just a great experience,” Woods said. “The fun and the money don’t move in the same direction. I had the most fun working high school and small college games.
“As you get higher up and paid more, expectations and criticisms and your level of accountability climbs up as well.”
But asked if he likes such pressure, Woods said, “I do.”
As much as he enjoyed officiating at the lower levels, Woods eventually became more eager to climb to the top of the ladder.
“After my second year in the Big Ten, I asked Bill Carollo, who was our supervisor, what I needed to do (to get to the NFL), and he helped me navigate that,” Woods said. “He was a three-time Super Bowl official.”
In 2015, the NFL invited Woods and 20 other officials from across the country to attend its developmental program. These were football officials the NFL had been actively scouting, and the applicants hired into the league come from that group.
Woods stepped onto the field for his first NFL game that summer at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia for the Eagles’ 40-17 drubbing of visiting Baltimore in Week 2 of the preseason.
In 2017, Woods became a full-time NFL umpire, his regular-season debut coming in a Monday Night Football contest at Denver.
“I did OK,” Woods said. “I’ve always got those nerves, but after that first hit you settle into the game.”
Woods opened last season as part of the officiating crew in the Indianapolis Colts’ 34-23 home loss to Cincinnati. He was part of the three-man crew that ejected safety Shawn Williams for his helmet-to-helmet hit on Indianapolis quarterback Andrew Luck late in the first quarter.
{&subleft}Fast-moving game
The speed of the game is something Woods had to adapt to with every new step in his football officiating career, but especially in the NFL. League veterans have told him the league has four speeds — preseason, pre-Thanksgiving, post-Thanksgiving and postseason.
“It’s very violent, but I think the most pronounced difference, in means of football, is precision,” Woods said. “The offensive linemen, their line coach, will instruct them to step at a 45-degree angle so they can chip off the defender. And the routes and the timing, they are much more precise.
“Before the snap I’m looking at the guard, center and the guard for any sort of false start. Once the snap happens, I transition from the center all the way to maybe the tight end on my side looking for holdings, hands to the face, chop blocks, defensive holding. Those types of fouls.”
Woods said officials prefer to use, in order, their presence, voice, whistle and flag. He compares it to his lifeguarding days when he was younger, saying kids will always look at you first before doing something they shouldn’t be doing.
{&subleft}Eyes in the booth
The networks’ ability to use slow motion and various angles to break down a play, if necessary, makes those watching the game on television an authority on whether or not the call (or non-call) was deserved. Moreover, each of the broadcast networks employs its own rules analyst to weigh in on the play just completed.
“They’ve got the inherent advantage of seeing a play at one-sixtieth of a second on a high-definition television, and we’re making calls in the split second,” Woods said. “We get greater than 90 percent of them right. It’s a game played by and officiated by humans, so we’re never going to get it all right.
“(Replay is) just an added layer to make sure that we do. I think that’s important to the integrity of the game.”
Woods has no problem with it, adding, “At heart they are officials and not TV commentators.”
With or without television analysts, Woods knows he’s always being watched.
“We get graded every play, every game by our supervisors,” he said. “They do travel, so you will have a supervisor at a game maybe five or six times a year. That supervisor will grade your game and maybe two other games.
“At their homes they have big screens and they get the film and watch every play from the different angles. They look at every play several times and make comments on if you had a correct judgment or an incorrect judgment. They get down to a very granular level.”
Woods is too immersed in what’s going on in front of him in the moment to think about how he’s being graded. He said the level of concentration that goes into working NFL games is one he likely doesn’t need in any other aspect of life.
{&subleft}Striving for longevity
Woods hopes to remain an NFL umpire until he’s in his early 60s, if possible.
Many variables, such as remaining in good health and how he performs in games, will play a large role in his longevity. Furthermore, Woods must be able to ward off younger officials who, like him, desire to work football games at the highest level possible.
The NFL receives approximately 2,000 new applications every year.
Carollo, a retired NFL official who shas worked as director of officiating for the Big Ten Conference since 2008, has monitored Woods’ progress carefully.
“Steve made a great first impression when I met him and he did well on the field. But you have to keep getting better,” said Carollo, who was part of the officiating crews for Super Bowls XXX and XXXVII. “I saw improvement when we brought him up to the Big Ten.
“But the thing that impressed me the most about Steve is his character. He has a passion for the game, and it’s those intangible characteristics we look for. Steve always puts the game ahead of himself and the crew ahead of himself.”
Carollo feels it’s only a matter of time before Woods works his way to working NFL playoff games, and, yes, even a Super Bowl or two.
Should it be in Dallas, the journey would be complete.
