I'm not an official; I'm a season ticket holder, and a 30+ year college basketball fan. I have a point of view about the quality of basketball officiating in the PAC-10, but I'm not looking to bash the entire industry. I have a couple of sincere questions, and would welcome some straightforward responses.
First of all, my opinion is that the quality of officiating in the PAC-10 is extraordinarily poor compared to other major D-1 conferences, and that this has been true for a decade or more. I believe that my opinion is the generally held view among serious fans of our program, and it seems to be the prevailing attitude conference-wide as well. I haven't seen a fan seriously take the opposing view in years. So, regardless of any other rivalry or perceived outrage, we all seem to have that in common.
PAC-10 officials call games very "closely" compared to other conferences, but are very inconsistent as well, with infractions and personal fouls called for a certain kind of behavior in one game, or one half, and not called for the same behavior in another game or half. Taken together, the constant injection of the officials into the game, in an apparently subjective way, just sucks the fun right out of the game. And every year we have a couple of games which at first stand out as particularly well played and entertaining; to the point that we don't just guess, but we know, that the game officials just cannot be PAC officials.
So here are my questions:
1) Does the PAC have the same reputation among other conferences and/or within professional refereeing circles that it has with the fans?
2) Are the PAC officials more or less qualified on average than other officials, and/or are they compensated as well, more, or less than other officials?
3) Does anyone know where the "hyper-strict" officiating style of the PAC comes from, and for what purpose?
4) What can the fans do to focus attention on this subject, if it isn't perceived as a problem by those who should know better?
[Edited by BTTB on Jan 21st, 2004 at 12:13 PM]