He went viral as college football's 'Beef Ref.' Now he's the Mountain West's coordinator of officials

Jul. 24—LAS VEGAS — The 2017 title game is worth remembering for a lot of things: Alabama's Bo Scarborough plowing through Clemson's defense for two thunderous scoring runs. Tigers quarterback Deshaun Watson taking hit after hit before seemingly finding a lane or someone open on the very next play. A seesaw of a fourth quarter, sealed by Hunter Renfrow's 2-yard touchdown reception with just one second left on the clock. Added together, a thriller. The essence of college football — encapsulated best by the game itself and something relatively outlandish catching on with the audience. For the game's head referee, Mike Defee, this wasn't even his first title game. He'd been noticed before over 19 years of officiating, well-accustomed to being caught on camera making a call, like the one he made with 12:25 left in the first quarter — a personal foul on Alabama's defense. Normal stuff. But there was never anything like this. With a quick screen grab of Defee making the call, jokes hit social media in a matter of minutes: "When you hit triceps earlier today and want America to be aware," CBS Sports tweeted. "when every day is arm day," ESPN College Football added. "Jacked ref alert," Darrell Romuld posted, for good measure. The simple takeaway: Defee was buff. People noticed. "I dressed the same, I looked the same for many, many years," he told the Journal last week. "It just shows you in today's world how a moment with social media can go viral." As of May, Defee, 61, now serves as the Mountain West's coordinator of officials after retiring from on-field activities in 2020. He still works out and cuts an imposing figure — after all, one doesn't just stop being "Buff Ref." Nor is he all too far from a semi-viral moment that led to unusual recognition and an interesting, if a little embarrassing, period immediately after. "The next year, I think the first spring game that I worked at Baylor, they knew I was coming," he remembered. "They had a set of dumbbells set up for me and it had a tag on it. It was pretty funny." And Defee is still drawn to the game, the one he loved since his boyhood in east Texas. The one he — ironically — was too small to play at first before getting his start calling Texas high school football games when he was 33. So now he's in the Mountain West, in addition to his day job (Defee is president of Newtron Holdings LLC, an electrical company based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana), similar responsibilities with Conference USA and some additional part-time work with the NFL. It's not the old Southwest Conference he grew up with or the iterations of the Southland Conference and Big 12 he spent countless games with. But it feels like coming home, and Defee has a very specific vision for what he'd like officiating to look like in the Mountain West. He will throw out traditional buzzwords here and there, but sidles outside the lines in lieu of nods to music and medicine: for example, minimally invasive isn't a reference to a small, uncomplicated surgery in this context. Rather, it might be the best way to sum up his whole philosophy. "I want a football player to force us to make a decision," Defee said. "I don't want to interject myself in the game; they're going to force me to interject myself in the game to take an action. Because our goal is anonymity. "The better the production is, the better the game is, the better the media perceives the game to be, the better job we're perceived to do." As he tells it, balance will be a focus. Defee's intent is to field eight-man crews (six officials, two replay specialists) for Mountain West games with a cross between younger referees and a set of veterans who can use their eyes the way he did for years. "There's two movements to the eyes: smooth pursuit and saccade," Defee said. "The saccade is what you use in officiating. And the saccade movement in the eye, you have to fixate on something. You can't just sweep past it — because (then) you're seeing no detail. "The saccade movement in your eyes allows you to see with great detail. You're looking at specific actions — taking quick snapshots — and you're looking for advantage-disadvantage. If we're neutral, we'll move to the next block. It's a progression." Defee paused, one of the more abstract elements of his longtime profession out in the open. "That's what we call winning the play," he quickly added. Then there's the matter of control and how to establish it. A former boxer himself, Defee recalls the words of the famed boxing referee, Judge Mills Lane. "Gentlemen, I'm firm but I'm fair," Lane would always tell his fighters before disappearing into the background of a match. Music to Defee's ears. "You've heard the term passive-aggressive?" he asked. "I'm aggressive-passive when it comes to officiating, which means we're going to aggressively manage the hour of pregame warmups. I (never wanted) anything on the field before the start. "If we have any issues going on, we want to get it early because then we set the tone for what we're gonna accept. And once players understand what we're gonna accept, they will conform and then it allows them to play a regular football game — and we get to stay out of it." Defee has seen referee retention numbers get worse over the years. He knows the scrutiny surrounding officiating is tough and only getting tougher. Added together, he knows he can't promise an immaculate product in the Mountain West. But he can promise a good one. "We're not going to be perfect," Defee said. "But when we're not perfect, we're going to own it and we're going to be transparent about everything that we do."