Gary Seymour, sports@wolfrivermedia.com
As kids playing Wiffle ball in the backyard, my brothers and I used to prop up a small picnic bench lengthwise behind home plate. If the pitch hit the bench, it was a strike, regardless of where the ball crossed the plate.
It was an imperfect system — batters had to protect against the shoestring-high slider, for example — but our “umpire” was perfect for our needs because it was impartial and consistent, two of the qualities not always present when the human element is introduced.
The picnic-bench ump came to mind in the wake of the off night that was had by the officiating crew of the NCAA basketball title game won by Duke over Wisconsin.
Specifically, how does one ensure that, in the capstone event of a enormously popular and even more enormously lucrative tournament with wide-sweeping career implications, the officials regulating the ebb and flow of the contest will be bringing their “A” game, too? Because the refs on Monday were a huge, steaming bowl of awful.
Before going any further, let’s get this part out of the way: Complaining about referees is generally always considered poor form. It can make the squawking side look small, petty and in need of a lollipop. Conventional wisdom holds that good teams overcome bad calls because bad calls are like life’s bad breaks. Everyone gets them at one time or another, and everyone has to surmount them.
There is also this: Duke might have been a better team than Wisconsin, at least from a matchup standpoint. The Badgers got beat on the drive all night by Duke’s super-quick guards. They had similar problems with Duke in December when they met as undefeated teams ranked in the top five, and Duke won by 10. Duke had its own matchup problems with Notre Dame, which gave the Blue Devils two of their four losses. Because A beat B and B beat C, it does not necessarily follow that A will beat C.
With all that said, the referee calls that drew the most scrutiny were plays that went against Wisconsin — one where a Duke player with possession of the ball stepped on the out of bounds line and the officials didn’t see it. The other was a rebound tipped out of bounds where it was ruled that Wisconsin touched the ball last.
Referees and umpires are unique in sports in that anything less than their 100 percent accuracy can trigger pandemonium. Teammates and coaches routinely try to lift up the player who boots a grounder or dribbles the ball off a foot, but rare are the words of encouragement for the ref who blows a call. It is impossible to get every bang-bang play right, especially when a tangle of extremities are involved.
That’s why the NCAA went to the trouble of giving authority to “replay officials,” who could sort out some of the bang-bang plays in slow motion replay and get the call right.
It’s when these “replay officials” move slower than a banana slug and still not see what was obvious to the television announcers and every other person watching — that the tipped ball was last touched by Duke — that you wonder what they are even doing there.
By this time, late in the game, the tide had already turned in Duke’s favor. Down by nine points, Duke had stormed back behind hard-charging guard Grayson Allen, whose 3-point field goal cut the deficit to six.
Our maybe “hard-driving, but never charging” guard is more precise. In the biggest play of the night, Allen barrelled off right tackle — that is, he drove the right side of the lane — and plowed into a crush of stationary Wisconsin defenders. Allen threw his arms in the air after putting up the shot, as if it wasn’t he initiating all the contact, and got the call — a spectacularly bad call, at that. Three-point play.
Instead of up by six points with possession, the Badgers, who throughout this memorable season demonstrated among other things that they could protect a lead better than anyone in college basketball, had their advantage cut in half. The Blue Devils had the all-important momentum basically handed to them and played with abandon the rest of the way.
Worse, no one on the floor, refs included, knew what they thought they knew in the first half. The criteria for charging/blocking fouls changed, just like that, from one half to the next. All that can be said about the refs’ capricious interpretation of the rules is that it was a shame.
It’s possible that the best team won. It’s a drag that, as a basketball fan, you have to question it.