Wow. Triple OT. Great game! Great no-call by Donnie Gray on the final play. At first viewing, it looked like a foul, but the MSU kid just lost the ball on the way up. Gotta feel bad for the MSU kid who missed a wide open lay-up with 4 seconds left, tho. And why exactly did that play end in a held ball? There was absolutely nobody around the Gonzaga kid who got the rebound. I just have to wonder what the heck the official saw on that one.

Other than that very strange call, the only thing about the officiating that I noticed was a lot of calls across the lane by the Lead. That's not fair. Not a lot. But more than I expected. Great game.

It looked like a MSU player had a hand on the ball as the Zag player gathered it in, and it spun him slightly. Gray might have seen the hand on the ball and thought the Zag player shuffled his feet because of the pull...and went with the bail out by calling it a held ball instead of a foul or travel.

easy to call with Tivo.....tough block /charge call at the end of a transition play that the lead took across the paint halfway thru the 1st. Flip a coin on that one? Heads = block.

[Edited by Larks on Nov 22nd, 2005 at 10:26 PM]

Looked to me like Donnie Gray got those two calls wrong on the point guard for Gonzaga- at least that was the majority opinion from Raferty & Bilas. How about those two foul calls where they had to use the monitors? It was pretty obvious who the fouls were on. Or, the official scorer with the wrong score on the gym scoreboard. The game looked to me like it was being played in slow motion-could have been jet lag (or whatever caused the cramps to the 4 MS players). If the MS players had won they would have played 4 games in 5 days.

I do have a question. For the 2nd overtime (I think), there was a travel at the end and they went to the monitor to put time on the clock. I thought they would have put .6 seconds on because that's when the whistle was. What is the rule? When the violation occured or when the official reacted? Just curious on the details of that.

The one official could be seen saying lag time during the discussion. It looks to me like they split the difference.

Also, I thought the clock operator was pretty bad. The clock stopped and started late several times. The stopping after made baskets was very inconsistent. One time it's in the net the next it's hitting the floor, and once it did not stop until it was OOB and just being released on the throw-in.

[Edited by blindzebra on Nov 23rd, 2005 at 10:18 AM]

Regarding the clock, I wondered if the clock that we saw on TV was in sync with the actual game clock. It seemed to me that we heard the horn before the clock on the TV showed all zeros. Maybe it wasn't all the timer's fault, I don't know, tho.

In the Connecticut/Arkansas game the night before, the scorekeeper gave Connecticut 3 points on a ball that was signaled as a 2 by Gray and clearly was a two. The clock also seems to have had issues all tournament.

One thing interesting about the MSU/Gonzaga game was that McDonough said that, after one of the overtimes, one of the officials (Kitts, maybe?) came over to the announcer's table to tell them, "do you understand what just happened?" and then proceeded to describe how Gonzaga would have won if the shot after the shot clock buzzer had gone down.

Between the coaches wearing Hawaiian shirts and the officials talking to the broadcast team during the game, you get the sense that things are pretty informal out there in Maui. Some pretty good basketball so far, though.