“I saw it after they had left the monitor, and actually thought about, is it in my prerogative to get up, run over to 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. I’ve never done it before. Why would I do it tonight and perhaps change the balance of the game?”They spent 2 minutes looking at the monitor and they didn't see what we all saw at home?!
I thought the whole point of this boring, game-stopping video review of a call was to save us from having to feel the way we do now — seeing what happened and knowing the call was wrong. They're not seeing what we are seeing?!
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UW fans will forever falsely believe that call cost them a championship. WI had a nine point lead in the second half and let it slip away.
So this guy is worried about perhaps changing the course of the game by making the correct call? That is a very compelling reason to do away with replay. One of several, actually.
The refs did a poor job. There were more bad calls against the Badgers tHan Duke. But poor shooting, not bad calls lost the game. Constant whining about bad calls is a MN thing. I hope WI doesn't adopt it.
Duke was whistled for 26 fewer fouls than their opponents in the NCAA tournament and shot 50 more free throws.
Duke is basketball royalty. Wisconsin isn't.
This kind of thing happens all the time. A good large scale example is the vote in Palm Beach county for Pat Buchanan a few years back.
That ball looks under-inflated to me.
It stems from misunderstanding the mission.
The mission of a referee is to make calls fairly in order to enforce the rules of the game.
When you make a crappy call, you've failed your mission.
The NFL has learned this, and MLB is on the way to learning this.
I don't think most referees, in most sports, in most levels, are taught well what the mission is.
"UW fans will forever falsely believe that call cost them a championship. WI had a nine point lead in the second half and let it slip away."
I agree we should and could have played better.
It's like in politics where you're supposed to win by such a wide margin that the cheating on the other side won't work.
Two really bad calls went against WI in the last two minutes of that game.
Ah well.
That’s how critical I thought the play was and concluded that this is a job for the guys on the floor.
He considers himself one of the players on the floor. He was not above the play. He's just a playa.
This is the way behind-the-plate umpires have played in baseball for many decades.
Winslow was basically assaulted on that play. Wisconsin should have gotten called for a foul. No pun intended, but Justice was done.
And I don't mean to say the officials cheated, though they may have been affected somehow in a way that biased them toward Duke. I understand that part of the game is tricking or intimidating the officials into making calls in your favor. I heard that the Duke coach is considered a master at that part of the game and I saw our coach yelling in the face of an official and didn't like it, but understood that it's part of his job. Maybe that's something some fans enjoy about the game. I'm not enough of a fan to be into the stuff about coaches, those old men in suits with red faces and endless gesticulations. I think a sport should be played by the athletes.
Refs are human and make mistakes, they usually even out over the course of a game.
Wisconsin lost because Decker shot 0-6 on 3 point shots and Jackson went 1-7. And the Wisconsin guards couldn't keep the Duke guards out of the paint.
There couldn't possibly be any allusions to the behavior of judges here.
Why would I do that tonight? It's that national championship game! If they are going to review it, they need to get it right. If you go with the thought that refs are human and make mistakes, then don't review their calls. Wisconsin had 32 points in the paint and Duke had 32 points in the paint--Duke couldn't stop Wisconsin in the paid either.. Wisconsin lost the chance to get 2 more points in the paint on that call (or maybe to hit a 3 pointer as they were due to make one).
I agree that what we saw at home told us that the call was wrong. If you're going to have monitors and not show the refs what we can all see at home, then that needs to be fixed for the integrity of the game and to preserve the people's belief in the integrity of the refs.
But I also agree that the problem was Wisconsin had no answer to a Duke freshman guard with a total "refuse to lose" attitude. Also, the replay at home sometimes showed Wisconsin players in a position to take a charge but still moving their feet. However revered Bo Ryan may be on campus, that's a coaching issue.
"We never saw, on our monitor, what everybody saw at home, if you can believe that."
Said NCAA head of officiating John Adams.
Heck, John Adams defended the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial, if you believe that.
MSU and Wisconsin both had some iffy calls against us/them when playing Duke. Although I fear in neither case were the calls the reason for the loss. They certainly didn't help.
1) They don't always have access to the same views that TV viewers have - it's a separate system that provides what the refs see.
2) It is appropriately not part of the process for the head of officiating to overturn the call of the refs working the game.
Catastrophic success: Wisconsin got Duke's big men in foul trouble and forced the Blue Devils to go to Game Plan B.
Because of my reading here, I watched that entire game. That time probably exceeds all of the time I have spent watching college basketball over the last thirty or forty years !
I do think those bad calls at the end might have changed the game.
The record of officials getting calls wrong based on video review isn't enough better than the record of officials getting calls wrong based on the live action to be worth the interruption to play.
The overall foul count over the course of the tournament is distorted by the fact that teams which are trailing deliberately foul in order to stop the clock and stretch out the game. Drawing fouls offensively and avoiding fouls defensively are both skills, and it stands to reason that better teams should have a favorable differential -- even before the end-game strategy kicks in. Duke's ratio for the tournament is also distorted by the stats against an overmatched #16 seed in its first game. If you discard that game, the difference is an average of three fouls per game- hardly proof of systemic pro-Duke bias.
It also bears noting that Duke's All-American center and leading scorer on the season was limited to 22 minutes on Monday due to foul trouble, and both he and Winslow (Duke's best all-around player in the tournament) both had four fouls. Conversely, the Wisconsin team as a whole was whistled for just two fouls in the entire first half (and just one on a starter).
As to the Winslow out-of-bounds play-- if he hadn't been hacked by Dekker, it wouldn't have been a loose ball in the first place. (Of course, the foul couldn't be called after-the-fact on the review). Oddly enough, Wisconsin was the beneficiary of a blown out-of-bounds call in the waning moments of regulation of the Big 10 championship game, which allowed them to tie the game and send it to overtime.
Wisconsin had an outstanding season and much to be proud of. It's a shame that it has to be overshadowed by unsupported claims of biased officiating.
"I think a sport should be played by the athletes."
The sport is played by the coaches too. Coaches are part of the game. Their role is key, especially in basketball. Good basketball players on the court will not win if they don't have a good coach directing their play and, yes, working the refs. The latter is the least important part of his job. Directing the flow of his team's play, calling plays, knowing when and whom to substitute, knowing who to put on the bench and for how long, watching the clock: that's the most important part. But working the refs is still necessary.
Put a sensor in the ball and put sensors on the players.
Let the machines decide.
Or don't get machines, even TV, involved at all.
First boo hoo.
Now Boo!
Bad enough to lose a nine point lead (and the Championship Game) to Duke. Don't serve them up the fine whine of Losers everywhere.
I watched every Wisconsin game in the tournament, and just from that sample, it looked to me that Dekker was the secret ingredient of every Wisconsin win. Whether it was Duke's defense or just an off day (happens to the best of athletes), Dekker just couldn't contribute either half. Plus, Jackson off the bench was no match for Grayson Allen off the bench.
I pretty much agree with this quote of Paul Mirengoff of Powerline from the link below.
"Things got even worse in the final, and this time the officiating strongly favored Duke. In the closing stages, the Blue Devils benefited from three terrible calls.
The most annoying one was the award of possession to Duke after replays clearly showed the ball went out of bounds off the final touch of Justice Winslow. What’s the point of stopping a game for minutes to review a call if the refs won’t reverse the decision even when everyone in America can see, through slow motion replay, the decision was wrong?
The refs blew another key out-of-bounds call, failing to notice that Winslow was out of bounds when he made a pass that led to a three-point play (the old-fashioned way) by Okafor. And Duke caught another enormous break when the ref called a blocking foul on an obvious charge by Winslow. Had the proper call been made, Winslow would have fouled out."
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/poor-officiating-mars-otherwise-excellent-ncaa-tourney.php
The truth is that the refs called a straight game in the first half, but as the half ended Super Coach K used his Army trained authority to give them orders to call more fouls on Wisconsin or else...and that's what they started to do.
It was embarrassing to see grown men totally submitted to one coach like that. Coach k must have asserted a power to fire them or transfer them out, and they believed it.
But one thing is sure. The Refs false calls over the last 10 minutes was no accident.
"I think a sport should be played by the athletes."
I agree with those who say that college basketball is over coached. Over coaching prevents the athletes from getting into a flow where their natural athletic ability and skill can more fully surface.
I didn't think the replay clearly showed the Duke player touching the ball last. But that's not what the official is getting at.
He's saying refs on court didn't see one of the angles that the TV audience at home saw. In other words, they weren't looking at all the evidence when they made their decision.
He's also saying that he became aware that there was additional evidence after the refs had done their review, made their decision, and returned to the court.
The question is, should he as a sideline official have interrupted the game? There have been some notorious incidents of that.
Another question, should he be talking about it? There is a reason jury deliberations are traditonally confidential.
Sniveling about the officiating is what losers do.
On review, I think the call was correct.
If you watch the Duke player's fingers, it looks like he might have touched the ball.
But if you watch the ball, there is no change in spin or trajectory at the point of the supposed touch.
Even the network guys, who are looking at an even better image than the folks at home, had to study that one angle several times before deciding that, maybe, a few molecules at the end of the Duke player's fingers brushed against some molecules loosely attached to the ball.
The ref's job in this instance was to reverse an obviously wrong call. This call, while perhaps wrong in the eyes of particle physicists, was not "obviously wrong." So the call was appropriate.
As a Duke fan, I have to say the call was incorrect. Unfortunate, but it is also unknowable as to whether it impacted the game.
Left Bank, you couldn't see the ball change, but you could the Duke players finger angle change, which couldn't have happened without the finger hitting the ball.
Personally, I don't think it would have made a difference. Duke made the shots down the stretch. Wisconsin did not. It was not a one point game.
LGV the Duke fan is probably correct. A much more egregious example of the referees screwing up AND definitely impacting the game came in the Badger's Final 4 victory over Kentucky, wherein three baskets should have been disallowed, and these errors were clearly obvious and did not require particle physics analysis.
When the Kentucky team dribbled up court with 24 seconds left in the game, they trailed by three. Had the zebras not debauched their responsibility, the Wildcats would have led by three at that point and it would have Wisconsin needing to foul in the desperate hope of getting the ball back. That measure rarely works and it didnt work for UK in the closing seconds Saturday night.
Bad calls happen all the time - the Badgers weren't able to rise above, as they had done in earlier games. Dekker disappeared, Trae (yikes) and Duke coaching/scouting did us in.
But really, this guy should have said something - the NCAA needs to re-evaluate what it's doing here.
Somewhere along the way I heard it said that a team never wants to put itself in the position that a referee's call makes the difference between winning and losing. Apparently WI put itself in that position and the inevitable happened. If WI had been up by the nine point lead someone said they had at one point, a referee's blown call would have made no difference.
The refs were the Three Blind Mice. They have been talking about this all day on ESPN. Grayson Allen was the great surprise. He won the game for Duke.
1) They don't always have access to the same views that TV viewers have - it's a separate system that provides what the refs see.
OK... I dont know how the system works but the timing annoys me. The ref said they didn't get that camera view at all. CBS showed multiple views and the one in question was not
definitive at first. CBS guy at one point mentions how it needs to be obvious. Then they start the frame by frame and the CBS guys are all excited how it's obvious. But their airing of that segment took so long ...Is it possible the reason that view didn't make it to the refs monitor is because CBS had it too long? ie can I blame CBS. I wanna blame CBS because they were too cheap to get the Sat. nite games and I dont have cable so I missed the real game where the best team lost.
It was poor officiating most of the game. Way to many whistles. Let the players play. I think only one time was there a no call on a drive to the basket. Very rarely is a charge of blocking foul. Most of the time it should be a no call. Most of the fouls called on Okafor were bs, as were most of the calls against the Badgers in the second half.
All that said, it still was a very good game between two very good teams.
But if you watch the ball, there is no change in spin or trajectory at the point of the supposed touch.
@Left Bank, your statement simply isn't true. Two of the four or five different perspectives shown by CBS clearly showed the trajectory perceptibly altered after being very slightly touched by a black person. The only black person in that scrum was the Duke player.
Replay officials get it wrong about half the time. This is not surprising, because they only get the really calls to review, and camera angles and resolution combined with distance are not usually up to the task.
For one, I would reject any official use of replay. It only disrupts the game and produces few benefits. As the old umpire in the joke says, "It ain't nothin' 'till I call it."
I would, however, let the fans see the replays, just to rile them up.
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