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ACC fans of 7 years or more will recognize a slight variation on the aforementioned play immediately. In the 1997 game between Duke and Virginia at Charlottesville, Norman Nolan of UVA went to the line for two with the score tied with about six seconds left in the game. He missed the first. UVA coach Jeff Jones, knowing that Coach K's preference in this situation is not to call a TO and let the chips fall, sends a sub to the bench once the ball is handed to Nolan for the second free throw, hoping to set his defense in the event of a make. The free throw rolls around the rim about three times, the din growing more extreme by the millisecond, until it finally goes in. As soon as the ball falls through the net, the clock-keeper is sounding the horn. Unfortunately, it was too loud to hear the horn, and the T on the free throws, Rick Hartzell (an outstanding veteran official), got brain lock and forgot that the sub was there. The clock-keeper sat on the horn for several seconds before realizing that play had been allowed to resume and the clock needed to be running, but the officials, not hearing it, didn't acknowledge it, and Steve Wojciechowski took the in-bounds pass the length of the floor and drew a shooting foul near the basket. At this point, the clock read about four seconds.
When the officials looked up at the clock, they knew something had gone badly wrong, so they went to the table to check. After being told what had happened, the crew huddled for a couple of minutes before deciding to go to the replay to check to see if Virginia's claim was true: to wit, that if the clock had been started on time, time would have expired before Wojo was fouled. This was Jones's second claim, actually. His first was that a do-over should be played, with the sub being allowed to enter, time being put back on the clock, and Duke inbounding underneath the Virginia basket with the original time remaining. Frank Scagliotta said no dice on that one. Paraphrasing here: "Jeff, if Wojo hadn't been fouled and he had missed the shot, you'd be saying the game is over."
Jones knew he had been trumped with that line of reasoning.
So they took a stopwatch out and looked at the replay about five times, timing it each time. They took the average length of time expired on the stop-watch, and subtracted that time from the game-clock. They ended up putting .5 on the clock and Wojo on the line for two. He made both, and Duke won the game. Replays showed that Hartzell had checked after the first free throw and recognized the sub, but he just forgot about him after the second shot. He wrote the Virginia AD and team an apology letter the next day. The crew (I can't remember the third member) was suspended for one game.
The moral, as others have already posted, is always to check the table. And in this case, remember the information such checks yield.
jb
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