Quantifying referees a mysterious process

[Larks]

This may have been posted last March.....but in light of another post on the board re. the SEC, kind of an interesting read.

Quantifying referees a mysterious process

By MIKE KNOBLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/10/05

Imagine someone taping every moment of your workday, editing out the productive hours and keeping only your worst five seconds. Then imagine having to watch that tape with your colleagues at the start of another day on the job. That's what it's like sometimes to be an SEC basketball referee.

That's what it was like to be Tony Greene 11 days ago in Columbia. He had arrived home in Stone Mountain at 2:30 a.m. after working a game in Starkville, Miss. Now, after six hours of sleep and a 200-mile drive, he sat in a locker room 90 minutes before the Florida-South Carolina tipoff watching videotape of a game he'd refereed a week before.

Greene studied himself on the TV as he played the sequence over and over. He was in position. He made the call. But did he get it wrong? Should he have called a shooting foul? The player drove the baseline, got hit on one side of the basket and released the ball on the other.

"What do you think?" Greene asked fellow SEC referee Ted Valentine.

"Shooting foul," Valentine responded. "Any foot, arm, hand motion toward the goal. That's what I tell the coaches: foot, arm, hand."

Greene watched the tape a few more times, looking for what he missed and how he'd avoid a similar mistake in the future. He's one of the best in basketball, so good that he has refereed two Final Fours and an NCAA championship game, so good that he refereed last year's SEC championship game and might work another this Sunday at the Georgia Dome. But even the best SEC referees never stop training, and they never stop seeing videotape evidence of the calls they get wrong.

It's easy to judge the other people you see on the court in the SEC tournament. Coaches win or lose. Players have scoring averages, rebound totals and plenty of other statistics that track their successes and failures. But no numbers tell you whether the refs had a good game or a bad game, and no standings tell you who's best and worst in the SEC. Only the most knowledgeable fans can identify referees by name, let alone rank their performance.

The refs, unlike most of the league's teams, don't wear their names on their uniform jerseys, and college refs, unlike their NBA counterparts, don't even wear numbers. Public address announcers used to introduce the refs before the game, but the NCAA put a stop to that. Refs don't give postgame interviews, and league rules bar coaches and players from critiquing the officiating.

The refs are the most mysterious and misunderstood people in college basketball. Fans never see the lengths the conference goes to hold officials accountable.

The referees attend an NCAA clinic before every season, and they meet regularly by conference call to discuss the latest rules interpretations. They must take and pass an online quiz twice a week. At most games, an observer evaluates their performance. Sometimes they receive a critique at halftime and after the game from supervisor of officials John Guthrie or roving instructor Don Shea. And they never work an SEC game without first watching and discussing a videotape of refereeing hits and misses from the week gone by.

That videotape can be a referee's harshest critic.

"The tape," Greene said, "doesn't lie."

No curse from an angry fan hurts any worse than being forced to sit and watch your mistakes. It's something every SEC referee experiences and something they all seek to avoid. In fact, it's something they have to avoid. If you become a regular on the tape you'll stop being a regular in the league. Referees work on one-year contracts.

"There were seven guys hired when I got hired. There's only four of us now," said Joe Lindsay, who is finishing his eighth year in the SEC. "It all comes down to John Guthrie's our boss and we work for the SEC. If I don't get the calls right, I'm not going to keep my job."

Is burnout a factor?

Fans try to figure out which referees help their team and which ones don't. Visit goboilers.com and you can see (or should it be smell?) the STINC-O and STINC-E ratings two Purdue fans developed to rank the rankest refs. Visit ukfans.net and you can find Kentucky's record broken down by official, compiled by chemical engineer and lifelong Wildcats fan Jon Scott.

Scott's research confirms what referees and referee coordinators say; the officials don't favor one team over another.

"There's really no trend," Scott said. "If they've refed enough games, Kentucky's winning percentage will be about the same. I haven't seen any smoking gun."

Think of it this way: Would you help one team beat another if you knew it could jeopardize your six-figure income? Most referees don't make that much a season, but some do. Top refs get $1,000 per regular-season SEC game, plus walk-up roundtrip coach airfare or automobile mileage money, plus a per diem. NCAA rules limit the number of games a team can play each season, but there's no limit on the number of games a ref can officiate. They're independent contractors, free to work for as many conferences as they choose and to accept as many games as they can handle. That can be as many as six or even seven games a week, with hundreds of miles of travel between tipoffs.

It's a sensitive subject in refereeing.

"If a basketball team played seven straight games, on the seventh day they wouldn't be very good," former Alabama coach Wimp Sanderson said. "Can a basketball official who's worked seven straight days be in position and use good judgment and have the guts to make the right call?"

Referees see the issue differently. They point out that officials like John Clougherty and Gerald Boudreaux are in demand for a reason.

"People watch them on TV and say they've got a lot of games. You know why? Because they're the must successful referees in the country," Lindsay said.

Catcher Bruce Benedict once played 134 games in a season for the Atlanta Braves. Now, he referees about 70 games a year before swinging back to baseball as an advance scout for the New York Mets. Endurance for a referee is about both mind and body, he said.

"We try not to look at the whole picture, because it tires you out," Benedict said. "You just do the best you can today. Most if not all of the officials I work with are very conscientious about their rest."

There's no question that officiating a basketball game is tiring, physical work. Ask SEC referee Tom Eades, who used to fly his Piper Arrow to and from games. One night he was heading home to Central City, Ky., from a game at LSU and fell asleep at 9,000 feet. He woke up 20 minutes later, still on course thanks to his autopilot, but so shaken that he soon sold the plane.

A slow grind to the top

SEC referees range in age from 26 to 60, with wives and kids and, in most cases, full-time jobs. SEC ref John Hampton, a business manager, ran for a seat in Kentucky's House of Representatives last fall and came within 1.2 percent of unseating the Democratic incumbent. Bob Donato was assistant principal and athletics director at Lower Merion High School, Kobe Bryant's alma mater. Rick Crawford runs youth camps for the Orlando Magic.

You don't just jump into refereeing and make a living at it. And you don't just jump into refereeing at the SEC level.

Valentine worked intramural games in college and called technical fouls on his roommate, who was also his best friend. The roommate moved out.

"But we talk now," Valentine said.

Benedict started in the 1980s working church league games and seventh- and eighth-grade leagues. It was four years before he officiated his first college game, four more before he worked an SEC game.

He went to referee camps five consecutive summers, spending a week in a college dorm with a roommate, no air conditioning, no telephone, no radio, no TV. Every day he'd officiate two or three games, then sit through a critique session with an instructor. The payoff came each winter as he got assigned to better and better leagues.

Refs often work both boys and girls games at the high school level, but college referees typically work men's games or women's games, not both. The SEC recruits the best of the men's referees for its developmental program, much like baseball's minor leagues. Guthrie identifies potential SEC refs in their early 20s and brings 60 a year to a summer camp in Tennessee. He looks for former college athlete, not necessarily basketball players, but guys who are at home in a competitive environment and have the athletic ability to keep pace with a fast-moving game.

SEC referee prospects work their way through junior college games in the Florida Panhandle, NAIA games in Americus and Franklin Springs, Division III games in Demorest and LaGrange and Division II games in Morrow and Columbus. A referee might work his way through nine lower level leagues before he gets his first shot at an SEC game in Athens or Knoxville.

And just reaching the SEC doesn't mean you've arrived.

"The first year in I think I got three games. The next year I got a couple more," said Lindsay, who worked 12 games between SEC teams this season and also called games in the ACC and Big East.

Today, he's at the SEC tournament. Next week, you might see him at the NCAA tournament. The referees, like the teams, have to earn their way into the field.

Selection Thursday for refs

The same committee that picks and seeds the 65 teams on Selection Sunday will choose the 96 referees Thursday. The top-performing refs in the tournament's first weekend get picked for the regionals. Stand out at the regionals and you get picked for the Final Four. For the referees, it's a Final Nine (three games, each with three referees), and getting there is as close to winning a national championship as a referee can ever come. The refs working this year's SEC tournament have worked 28 Final Fours.

"They have a really good staff," said NCAA coordinator of officials Hank Nichols. "I would say it ranks in the top two or three."

That didn't happen by accident. It had something to do with those summer camps and that pregame videotape, those online quizzes and that developmental program.

You could see it after Florida beat South Carolina, after the CBS telecast went off the air and the fans spilled out of the Colonial Center. Greene, Valentine and Lindsay discussed the crucial calls they'd made that day and arranged to review the game on videotape. They didn't have to explain themselves to reporters or coaches, but they knew there was one demanding man they'd have to answer to for any questionable calls, same as always.

"Guthrie," Valentine said. "He'll be calling."

[Jurassic Referee]

Good article, Larksy. Thanks.