Going opposite...

[Nevadaref]

Originally Posted by zebraman

I heard from several people that the change was made because coaches were taking advantage of having the calling official in front of them and complaining way too much. I have heard that from several people including a couple college assignors. Thus the change and also the emphasis on coaches staying in the box this year. Who did you hear that from Nevadaref?

I posted the following back on July 17 on the NFHS forum shortly after returning from a camp with several D1 officials:

It is true that the NCAA is returning to the mechanic of the calling official going opposite the table this coming season.

There were two reasons given for this.
1. The coaches were engaging the officials in too many conversations and it was detracting from the flow and speed of the game.
2. The calling official was mostly becoming the Trail and then the Lead on the subsequent trip, so this official was in the most probable location to make another call. (You have to accept that the Lead official makes most of the calls in the 3-person system for this argument to hold water. That assumption may or may not be true.) It was concluded or perceived that the Center official was not participating very much in the game while the other two officials were making the majority of the calls and simply swapping back and forth. There had to be an off-ball call by the Center to get him into the mix and then the new Center was left out for a while. Right or wrong that is the explanation I was given by the top D-1 guys.


(It was also made clear that the change resulted more from point #2 than point #1.)