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That is because, while the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens clearly earned their way to the Super Bowl, questions have been raised about whether the top referee this season will be joining them.

The league is expected to announce this week that Jerome Boger, an N.F.L. referee for seven years, will lead the crew of officials here Sunday. Historically, that means Boger scored the highest among referees during the standard postgame evaluations — a notion that some observers and, privately, several other on-field officials find hard to comprehend.

"What's happening right now is that the best officials are not working the best games," said Jim Daopoulos, who worked 11 years as an on-field official and 12 years as a supervisor of officials before becoming an officiating analyst for NBC. Daopoulos added that he believed that the grading of some officials, including Boger, was altered because the league had a predetermined assignment in mind.

"I'm looking at the seven guys who are working in the Super Bowl, and to be quite honest, several of them should not be on the field," Daopoulos said.

Michael Signora, a spokesman for the N.F.L., disputed that, writing in an e-mail, "There is no merit to the suggestion that Jerome Boger's grades were treated differently from those of any other official."

Signora added, "Claims to the contrary are both inaccurate and unfair."

Still, some elements of the appointment seem strange. Ben Austro, the founder of FootballZebras.com, a Web site that focuses on news and analysis of officials in the N.F.L., first reported the Boger assignment several weeks ago. Austro said in an interview Monday that he was immediately struck by something unusual about the choice, noting that every official is graded by league observers following each game worked, with every call made being deemed correct or incorrect.

This season, according to Austro, there were approximately eight instances in which Boger was initially given what officials call a ding, or markdown, for a particular call, only to have those negative grades later overturned. In other words, Austro said, if Boger earned the best grades among referees this season, he did so with the help of significant after-the-fact revisions from those doing the grading.

Although it is not clear which grades were changed, Boger did have some unusual moments this season, most notably a sequence in Week 16 when he announced a penalty against Carolina quarterback Cam Newton for "bumping" him while protesting the officiating but did not eject Newton, as the rules require. Boger later said that he misspoke and that the penalty against Newton was only for "disrespectfully addressing" an official.

According to Daopoulos, the standard procedure is for one of several league supervisors to first review a game on his own. The supervisors then get together as a group to go over the downgrades detected, and generally, Daopoulos said, "the majority or consensus rules" when it comes to overturning a downgrade.

This season, however, Daopoulos — and several officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly — said Carl Johnson, the league's vice president for officiating, unilaterally overturned a number of Boger's downgrades.

Neither Johnson nor Ray Anderson, the league's executive vice president for football operations, were made available for comment. But Signora, the spokesman, said, "No downgrade is removed unless there is a consensus among the supervisors and the head of the department."

Regardless, while appealing a grade is not unusual — 14 of 18 referees did so successfully this season, according to Signora — the fact that Boger had eight reversals is odd, according to Gerry Austin, who officiated in three Super Bowls from 1982 to 2008 and is now an ESPN contributor.

"Based on my past experience, if you could get two downgrades changed in the course of the year, you've done real well," Austin said.