I know all three of those officials and I would put all my money on them NOT being homers. One of them is my good friend and I will be staying at his house (again) when I go to Vegas in a couple of weeks.
He was the official at Lead on the call for Collison. He has been battling cancer for the last year. I was going to send him a text message because he looked like he was his old self on the highlights I saw. I think one of the messages others have been trying to deliver is without walking in someone else's shoes you may not be qualified to give such a strong and damaging opinion. Did they ref a perfect game? Without seeing the game I can say they didn't. However, without experiencing things on that level you can't know what it is like. In 2002 I went to the Pac-10 camp and that was a TON of pressure - ramp that up by 1 million and that is what these guys were going through.

I will ask Bobby if he got caught up and will tell you what his reply is - I'm going to tell him you said he did Breeze because I don't want to have him cuss me out!

Go for it. I never said they were homers. I also said the game was officiated well except at the end(((Edit add- Stanford can learn from the loss because they did falter down the stretch which I did note and both teams still will be in good shape for the NCAA) and I already said I should have been more careful with my original post that overshadowed these two points which I think are fair. The second one is much more debatable in my opinion. For these two I'm saying in general not a specific game.

Have refs been caught up in the excitement of a game, especially one that is close, and made calls that were not consistent with how the game was being called before?

Do refs get caught up when a team is on a roll and start favoring the team with momentum?

Where are you going with all this? Officiating is like anything else, Murphy's Law applies. (paraphrased) Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

1. Has this ever happened. Sure. Have refs ever got caught up in this same excitement and choked on it and not called anything? Sure. Has this been the perception of players/coaches/fans that came up on the short end? Every night.

2. Does this ever happen? Possibly. Do these same refs, maybe on the next possession make a call that stalls the momentum of this team on a roll? Possibly.

There is a standard answer for most questions of this nature, the same answer that I give when I arrive at a game and someone asks "How are you?"

"It depends on who you ask."

Yes, you are. You might not realize you are doing so. You might not mean to do so. Maybe you're too caught up in the intensity of the action....

In any event, this thread is also over.