From our Hartford, CT, morning, drive-time, sports announcer. This is his daily "Sports Commentary". Normally I almost always agree with him, however I didn't like the tone of today's commentary:
http://www.wtic.com/topic/play_windo...udioId=1460289
Wednesday, February 13th 2008 - Sports Commentary
"I've always been a proponent of the human element in the officiating of sports events. The fallibility of the umpire in baseball has been one of the enduring charms of the game. Larry Barnett and Don Denkinger have provided as much fuel for the hot stoves as anyone who ever played the game. Nothing shortens winters more than a raging controversy. Unfortunately, in most sports, those days are forever behind us. Sports have long since moved into the electronic age and technology has replaced the human eye and human instinct in determining the minutest points of arbitration. The primary directive with the electronic surveillance of sporting events should be simply, "Get it right". If slow motion replay analysis of every action on the court or on the field or on the ice is going to be the determining factor there is no excuse for getting the call wrong. All parties have distanced themselves from responsibility for the nearly second and a half pause on the game clock at the end of the Tennessee women's basketball win over Rutgers monday night. The president of the company that produces the precision game clocks says there is room for human error in the operation of the timepiece, but the clock itself is infallible. Only the on court officials are supposed to have the ability to stop the clock once play is underway. Responsibility for causing the clock to pause at the end of the game, holding two tenths of a second on the board long enough for a Tennessee player to be fouled with time remaining isn't the issue here. The responsibility of the referees is clear. They did review a replay to determine if there was time left. That was the only decision they made based on the review, despite the fact the replay clearly showed the clock paused while the ball was still in the air on the rebound after a missed shot.
In another game on the same night, the men's game between Georgetown and Villanova, with the clock running down, less than a second left with a Georgetown player tightroping the sideline at the far end of the court from his offensive basket, one of the officials chose to whistle a foul on a Villanova player, who was leaning away from the offensive player, hands extended over his head in an obvious attempt to avoid a foul. One tenth of a second left in a tied game. It's hard to watch the way college basketball games are officiated on a nightly basis and buy the argument from officials that the game is forty minutes long, not thirty nine minutes, fifty nine and nine tenths seconds, and every foul should be called the same. On a nightly basis they give themselves little evidence to back that philosophy. Their's is a position of judicious arbitration. The spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. If modern technology is going to provide the final determination the call must be right. If the deciding factor is common sense, then common sense must be the deciding factor. In both cases on the same night
the outcome was determined by the wrong call. It was a bad day for modern officiating. With a comment from the sports world, I'm Scott Gray."
I wish that he had consulted an NCAA official before he wrote this commentary. The Rutgers Tennessee situation was really weird, but I believe that the Villanova Georgetown situtaiton was very clear. The blocking foul by the Villanova player put the Georgetown player at a disadvantage, causing him to go out of bounds. I would call this in the first second of a game, or the last second of a game. If the fact that the Georgetown player was 80 feet away from his basket with less than one second left in the game is important, as the announcer states, than why was the Villanova player anywhere near the Georgetown player?