What You Say About the Officials When They’re Not Around

What happens in the locker room after a game with bad officiating?

Usually: the officials become the explanation for everything that went wrong. The conversation centers on how they cost you the game, how they favored the other team, how incompetent or biased they were. And the room bonds around that shared grievance.

That conversation feels good in the moment. It’s also costing you something you probably haven’t accounted for.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Only what is helpful for building others up. That’s a high standard for locker room conversation. But it points to something real: the talk that circulates in a team environment shapes the culture of that team. And the team that consistently bonds around external blame — officials, opponents, circumstances — is developing a culture of excuse-making that eventually reaches into how they handle everything.

The official conversation is a proxy for a larger pattern. When things go wrong, where does this room look? Inward at what we can control and improve? Or outward at the convenient explanation that doesn’t require anything from us?

Both things can be true: the officials made bad calls, and the team also made mistakes that contributed to the result. The conversation that only acknowledges the first and ignores the second is not honest. And a room that can’t be honest about its own contribution to a bad result is a room that will keep producing bad results.

The officials conversation is worth having — briefly, accurately, without excess. Then move to the conversation that actually produces something: what did we do that we can do better, and what do we need to work on before the next game.

Honest team self-assessment. The ratio question is practical and diagnostic.