It's an interesting article on a practice that I had no idea went on. I've done scrimmages at D1 schools but only got a drink and a sandwich. This takes it to another level.
http://www.sportsline.com/collegebas...story/10901729
Time to blow whistle on risky referee business?
July 18, 2008
By Gary Parrish
CBSSports.com Senior Writer
The referee hopped the plane headed for the Caribbean, swimming trunks packed with his whistle for three days of fun-in-the-sun disguised as work. His five-star hotel was gorgeous -- complete with waves crashing into the beach just outside his window.
And as he sat in the hot tub enjoying fruity drinks at the all-inclusive resort, he thought to himself he was really living nice, officiating one exhibition per day for the college team with which he made the NCAA-allowed foreign trip.
The best part?
The referee didn't pay for a thing.
The university footed the entire bill.
And isn't this an obvious conflict of interest?
"Yeah, probably," said one college coach who recently took two officials on a foreign trip but declined to speak on the record about the subject. "I could see why it might be a conflict of interest. But everybody does it and it's been going on forever."
The Tim Donaghy gambling scandal that rocked the NBA has produced many subplots, among them Donaghy's assertion in a court document that improper relationships between referees and league officials (such as players, coaches and scouts) could influence the outcomes of games. Naturally, the theory was immediately dismissed by David Stern.
But it seemed to me Donaghy was making a decent point, and it got me thinking about the college game and how unusual relationships between referees and schools could similarly influence the outcomes of games.
And by relationships, I mean actual business relationships.
College basketball programs, you see, regularly hold intrasquad scrimmages in the fall and during the season, and it's common for NCAA referees to officiate those scrimmages. In fact, I couldn't find a single coach in a random poll at the LeBron James Skills Academy earlier this month who doesn't use NCAA referees for scrimmages, and the going rate for an hour of work is somewhere between $100 and $200, most acknowledged.
Furthermore, schools also typically take referees on foreign trips, meaning referees enjoy what is basically a vacation to Mexico or Europe or Canada every year with schools paying all their expenses. So what we have are referees making thousands of extra dollars per year from schools -- and taking all-expenses-paid trips out of the country with teams -- and then calling games featuring the same schools from which they literally receive paychecks.
It's a questionable practice, particularly when you think of it in these terms: Let's pretend a referee took a summer trip with, say, John Pelphrey and Arkansas to Cancun. It's all-expenses paid, all the food and drinks he can handle in exchange for officiating three games over a five-day period. Now let's pretend that same referee, who lives in the Fayetteville area, also works 10 scrimmages for Arkansas during the preseason at $150 each. And now let's pretend it's December, and that same referee is assigned to an Arkansas-Oklahoma game, and Pelphrey is out of the coach's box, going crazy, stomping his foot, screaming and yelling about a call.
Does the referee issue a technical foul or does he swallow the whistle because he knows if he blows it he might also be blowing his opportunity to make extra cash and take another free trip? Honestly, I can't answer that question for sure (and this is, admittedly, an extreme hypothetical).
But the fact that a referee could be put in that situation suggests it's something that might need to be addressed, which is why John Adams, the NCAA's national coordinator of men's basketball officiating, said he might address it.
"I never really thought about it until you brought it up," Adams said by phone. "But it might be something as a group we can talk about at our five regional clinics in October, find out if there is a consensus."
Even then, Adams said, this is ultimately a league issue because though the NCAA can make recommendations, it has no authority over any restrictions a league may or may not place on its officials. Meantime, the coordinators of officials for the six BCS-affiliated leagues -- the ACC, Big East, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC -- all either declined interview requests, ignored interview requests via league representatives, failed to return phone calls or deferred to Adams when approached by CBSSports.com.
So on this subject we're left with Adams, who said he believes one remedy to the problem -- though he hesitated to label it a "problem" -- would be for leagues to make their member institutions use referees who do not normally work games in their league for any and all foreign trips.
"Maybe the game would be better served if those officials were from outside the conferences that would generally feed referees into the league the team is in," Adams said. "You could conceivably have three guys in Albany, N.Y., who are NCAA tournament-quality officials who never work Conference USA games go on a trip with a Conference USA school and avoid any perception of favoritism once the regular season and conference season gets started.
"If we are talking about 15 things that aren't rules-related at our October meetings, this could be one of the things we talk about," Adams added. "It's worth addressing. But I don't see it as a problem yet."
Perhaps not.
But it is a blurred line and slippery slope.
Which is why college basketball needs to address the issue now and set some guidelines pertaining to how referees should and should not receive benefits. The alternative is to wait for it to become a problem at the center of a controversy and then react.
That wouldn't be wise because by then the integrity of the sport and its referees would be questioned on a grand scale, and those in the NBA will tell you it's best to try to avoid that kind of scandal if you can because recovering from it is a lengthy and costly process, if not an impossible one.