Referee for Sunday Night

Cheffers’ crew has been fair to us over the years, but so was Vinovich’s until the NFC Championship so take what I’m about to post with a whole box of salt...

Cheffers has been in the white hat for 13 of our games during the Payton Era. In that span we’ve amassed a 12-1 record with splits of 8-1 in New Orleans and 4-0 on the road. Here’s the list of games in that span:

• 2009 Week 13 @ Redskins, 33-30 W
• 2011 Week 9 vs. Buccaneers, 27-16 W
• 2012 Week 5 vs. Chargers, 31-24 W
• 2013 Week 17 vs. Buccaneers, 42-17 W
• 2014 Week 5 vs. Buccaneers, 37-31 W
• 2014 Week 15 @ Bears, 31-15 W
• 2015 Week 2 vs. Buccaneers, 19-26 L
• 2015 Week 7 @ Colts, 27-21 W
• 2016 Week 15 @ Cardinals, 48-41 W
• 2017 Week 8 vs. Bears, 20-12 W
• 2018 Week 5 vs. Redskins, 43-19 W
• 2018 Week 11 vs. Eagles, 48-7 W
• 2018 Divisional vs. Eagles, 20-14 W

In recent years his crew’s number of flags seem to have gone down for the most part with the exception of the Divisional playoff game last year (which was an “all-star” crew and not his normal cronies) and more than half the games (8 of the 13) were called relatively evenly regarding penalties.
His crew doesn’t seem to be overly “flag happy”, but they also aren’t loosely officiated.

Edit: I’m just now realizing Cheffers has nearly an entirely new crew this year with the exception of his side judge so yeah, this may be a bumpy one.



Cheffers also officiates the snap very tightly (he called Brees for a false start in Week 11 last year for his hand gesture/head bob) so Bridgewater has to be on his P’s and Q’s regarding that.

With all that said, these are all generalizations and can be as worthless as the words on your screen are, but form your own conclusions.