ESPN are a bunch of idiots too!!!!!

[canuckrefguy]

Originally Posted by jimpiano

This is, of course, the downside of technology. We now have the capability to slow down, freeze, and replay forever and find a reason to overturn a call or bash an official. And officials are just as hard on other officials as fans are.

Case in point was the Oden foul in the Xavier game. None of the game announcers, sportswriters, or the Xavier coach made much more of the foul than what it was, a foul. Yet officials on this forum wanted an intentional foul called based, solely, on replays and youtube video.

No call or decision by an official can be judged in a vacuum. Instant replay in football does no one any good if the play has to be viewed ad nauseum until a decision can be reached. It serves only to slow the game down.

Whether there was travelling or not by Georgetown is a non issue since no official at the highest level of the NCAA would make that call based on a real time view. It is only controversial when it is slowed down and even then you have a debate.

As officials we need to advocate and educate the media on not only the rules but how we apply them, i/e what constitutes a block/charge call in basketball, what kind of tag in baseball always means an out, how is interference in football judged...etc.

CBS's example of the Georgetown travel was unfair to the crew working the game.....we need to make sure that kind of distortion is avoided in the future

Some GREAT points....

If the play had been called a travel, I wonder if that official would have been torn a new you-know-what by the observer for making a ticky-tack call.

Think about the ACTUAL situation - a lightning fast sequence of events involving some of the quickest athletes in the country - pressure situation in the last seconds of a game, in front of 20,000 people, and on national TV.