Duke/Wisconsin Refs Say They Never Saw The Angle That 28.3 Million People Watching On TV Saw For The Crucial Out-Of-Bounds Replay
ESPN – “All four of our officials were involved in the review — Jeff Clark was our standby,” Adams said. “We never saw on our monitor what everybody saw at home, if you can believe that.”
Adams said he saw the broadcast angle only after the referees left the scorer’s table, and considered taking an unprecedented step — calling the officials back over to the monitor — before deciding against it.
“I saw it after they had left the monitor, and actually thought about: Is it in my prerogative to get up, run over the table, buzz the buzzer and tell them to come back and look?” Adams said. “That’s how critical I thought the play was, and concluded that this is a job for the guys on the floor and I’ve never done this before, why would I do it tonight and perhaps change the balance of the game?”
Just to reiterate for the 100th time, I’m not a Wisconsin fan. I had absolutely 0 stake in the game Monday night. I’m a college basketball fan plain and simple and the level of refereeing for the entire tournament was an absolute travesty. That’s just a fact, from an objective viewer. It wasn’t one sided towards any team. It wasn’t rigged for a specific team. It didn’t make one team win the tournament. It was disgustingly bad, for everyone equally, during every game. From ticky tack foul calls that put every player on the floor in foul trouble, to major possible game swaying catastrophe calls, it was the common theme throughout the whole thing. Never seen anything that bad.
Yes I get that bad refs is a common complaint for every single sport. Refereeing is a borderline impossible job and you’re never going to make all sides happy. But anyone who watched a lot of March Madness games knows how apparent it was that the refs were botching major calls and had no control of the game. You got people like Geno Auriemma firing shots saying the men’s game is a “joke” and tough to watch, then during the most high profile games of the year, we’re getting possession calls dead wrong. It’s just a horrible look.
And the worst part of it is that so much of it is easily fixable. Like how is it even possible we can have a story like this? That a possible game-deciding call of the CHAMPIONSHIP game was screwed up because an angle 28.3 million Americans watched happen live on their TVs can’t be seen by the people in charge of making the call? That something I took a Vine of in 5 seconds clear as day can’t be shared on the game floor? That’s simply unreal. With 2015 technology shit like this should not be happening in the biggest college hoops game of the year.
And Duke fans will say “wahh wahhh get over it” because it ended up not hurting them in the end, but for everyone else who likes watching basketball without 100 fouls a game and with more correct calls than incorrect calls being made, it’s obvious this needs to get better.
PS – Tough to blame it all on technology though when the worst call of the tournament was like 20 refs staring directly at a shot go in a full 1 second after the shot clock went off and doing nothing about it.