Big Dance Officials

[lrpalmer3]

Originally posted by Mark Dexter

Are you sure about this?

I know each automatic bid conference is guaranteed at least one official from their regular staff to work the tourney, but does it extend to conference championships, too? (32 auto-bid conferences x 3 officials = 96 officials. Even with some overlap, that means there would be very few 'at-large' ref bids.)

Conference coordinators nominate officials from their conference. It makes sense that the officials being nominated are also the ones chosen for the conference championship game. I had not heard about "automatic bids".