Kevin Randall was wrapping up his 10th season as a college football official and preparing to spend Thanksgiving with his family when he received an email notifying him of a new game assignment.
The timing was strange to Randall, an American Athletic Conference referee who knew he was not going to be working the conference championship game and figured it was too early to learn which bowl game he would be officiating. Upon opening the email, Randall found his answer — he was being assigned to the Army-Navy game, which he had always wanted to attend while growing up in Starkville.
“It had always been a dream of mine to go to the Army-Navy game,” Randall said. “I never knew that the first time I got to go was going to be as the referee. Immediately, I got a little emotional, just because it’s such an honor to work that game and it means so much to so many people.”
Randall’s father, Craig Randall, spent two separate stints as an assistant coach at Mississippi State in the 1980s, working as an assistant athletic director in the interim. Before coming to Starkville, he coached the defensive line at Texas A&M and LSU, but his coaching career began at Army, where he also coached swimming and lacrosse.
Craig also was at Air Force for two years, so he understood that football at the service academies was different than anywhere else, and he and Kevin used to watch the Army-Navy game, played a week after the end of the regular season, every year.
“My family had always had a lot of respect for the service academies because of my dad and his coaching there,” Randall said. “My wife and daughters have always been super supportive of my officiating. I miss time at home on the weekends and that sort of thing, but they’ve always been super supportive of me, so we were just all excited.”
Kevin Randall became a standout quarterback at Starkville High, leading the Yellow Jackets to a state championship as a senior in 1994. He attended MSU for two years before finishing his bachelor’s degree in physical therapy at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, then returned to Starkville and spent 14 years as MSU’s on-campus physical therapist.
In 2020, Randall took on a new role as the MSU Foundation’s assistant director of gift planning, a position he still holds today. He had been a baseball umpire in high school and college but quickly grew bored of it, and it wasn’t until 2006 that he first started officiating football, starting with high school games in Mississippi.
“We would travel together on Fridays, going to high school games,” Randall said. “As a football official, you are literally the third team out there on the field. I just fell in love with it, working with (my crew members) on Friday nights.”
Randall and his officiating crew worked one of the Mississippi high school championship games in 2012, a game that was televised locally, and he caught the attention of longtime NFL official Jack Vaughn. Vaughn wondered why Randall had not made it up to the college ranks, and Randall said he didn’t know how the process worked. With Vaughn’s mentorship, Randall began working junior college games in 2013, then was picked up by Conference USA in 2015.
That was the season in which the center judge, an eighth official standing behind the offensive backfield adjacent to the referee, became standard in major college football. Randall worked as a center judge until 2019, when he was promoted to head referee. He began working with the AAC — which Army and Navy recently joined as football-only members — in 2022.
“Essentially what you become (as a center judge) is like a second referee back there in the backfield,” Randall said. “You’re looking at roughing the passer, you’re watching the offensive line, and the center judge enforces all the penalties. It was a new position, and I learned it on the fly.”
The Army-Navy game took place this past Saturday in Landover, Maryland, with the Midshipmen defeating the Black Knights 31-13. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin performed the pregame coin toss with Randall facing him at midfield.
Army and Navy both use option-based, rush-heavy offenses, a contrast from the spread systems many college teams run these days. But Randall said the game is easier to officiate than most because of how disciplined both teams almost always are. The officiating crew flagged Navy five times for 70 yards, while Army committed just one five-yard penalty in the entire game.
“It’s unique in that it’s the purest form of college athletics today,” Randall said. “One of my officiating buddies made the comment that this is the only game in America where the guys playing on the field are willing to die for the people who watch it. That really struck me. The pageantry behind it, the commitment those players make, just goes way beyond anything a lot of people can comprehend.”
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