As March Madness begins in earnest, so will the debates and controversies over calls made by stressed-out referees officiating the NCAA tournament.
Addressing the subject, Hank Nichols, the former head of NCAA basketball officials, once lamented, “Why can’t the coach just say, ‘Yeah, we got a bad call and we We lost the match” instead of making a big noise. it stinks ? You know, this bad decision is also part of basketball.
The idea that a referee error is just another example of bizarre misfortune is an affront to everything sports fans hold sacred.
The promise of fairness is the cornerstone of organized sport. The referees’ job is to ensure fairness. So one might expect that executives in charge of major competitions, like the billion-dollar March Madness tournament, would spare no effort to root out officiating errors.
Wrong calls are quietly seen as a cost of doing business, an acceptable price to pay to keep the game running.
But this is not the case. While well-funded sports leagues certainly have the technological capacity to analyze and evaluate every contentious call, doing so would prolong games, posing a challenge for television programming and further fragmenting the action. Instead, bad decisions are quietly seen as a cost of doing business, an acceptable price to pay to preserve the flow of the game.
Of course, no one dares to say it out loud. Complacency about making every call is one of the dirty little secrets of commercial sports, both college and professional. To openly acknowledge that more can be done would simply be to stir up a hornet’s nest, particularly among the horde of gaming interests so dependent on the appearance of fair competition.
So, conveniently, we have a scapegoat – dressed as a zebra, with black and white stripes. Dictionary definition of a scapegoat: a person who is blamed for the wrongdoing, errors or faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency. This perfectly describes the role that referees play.
Take the 2015 NCAA men’s championship game. Duke was leading by five points when a referee made a controversial call in favor of the team. Meanwhile, fans watching the game on CBS were able to view video in which the ball clearly went out of bounds after bouncing off a ball. Duke player, not a Wisconsin player.
Had the referees looked at the same camera angles repeatedly shown to CBS viewers, they undoubtedly would have corrected the call. But who has time for that? In the end, Duke won the championship, 68 to 63.
The NCAA places awkward limits on video review – determining if, when, how and how often to integrate technology into decision-making.
Section 4 of the NCAA’s instant replay rules states that “officials shall not use available equipment for judging,” including “goalkeeping.” Why, exactly?
Likewise, in the NFL, certain types of fouls, such as pass interference, are not considered reviewable. (Good luck in the Supreme Court, Saints fans.)
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Major League Baseball continues to eschew the potential benefits of an electronically monitored strike zone to supplement the umpire’s subjective calling of balls and strikes. The sport added video review in 2008, initially allowing only the crew chief umpire to use it – and only for the purpose of assessing the legitimacy of home runs. Since then, a few other scenarios have become eligible for video review, including tag games and ball traps. But progress has been slow.
Everyone knows there is a better way, and everyone understands, or should understand, that there is a Gentlemen’s Agreement not to pursue it.
Scapegoats therefore have a purpose. Without them, fans might question which policies are truly responsible for the bad calls, and it could get messy.
The next time you find yourself enraged by a missed call – whether it’s during this year’s NCAA tournament or next year’s Super Bowl – remember the scapegoat and why he’s there. Faced with human error, sports fans may ignore the underlying system error.
Bob Katz is the author of a novel about basketball, “EZ and the Intangibles,” and a nonfiction book about college basketball referees, “The Whistleblower: Rooting for the Ref in the High-Stakes World of College Basketball.”
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