It wasn’t just the Fail Mary: Looking back at the NFL’s 2012 replacement referee debacle

Toney Brasuell was sound asleep the night of Sept. 24, 2012, when his wife nudged him awake and told him to turn on the TV. “You’re gonna wanna watch this,” she said. “It doesn’t look good.”A financial adviser based in Benton, Ark., Brasuell spent the previous two months moonlighting as an NFL replacement official, working four preseason games and the first three weeks of the regular season while the regular refs warred with the league over a new contract. Brasuell’s crew had excelled, he believed, earning multiple prime-time assignments and never hearing a word from the NFL about a missed call or sloppy sequence.Advertisement