Saturday night’s officiating debacle in Charlottesville couldn’t have come at a worse time for the ACC. Its own coaches have spent the past month questioning the credibility of their own officials, rightly or wrongly, to the point where commissioner Jim Phillips had to send out a memo to coaches and athletic directors this week telling them to shut up about it.
When three veteran officials botched the end of the Duke-Virginia game, not by a missed judgment call but by what the league later acknowledged was a basic misapplication of the rulebook — a cardinal sin! — it gave credence to all those complaints. The ACC took the nearly unprecedented step of issuing a public statement of error late Saturday night, but it may be too late to slow the narrative that’s gathered steam.
The reality is this: ACC officiating isn’t any worse than it is anywhere else, and it’s as good as it is anywhere else in the Power 5. Look no further than what’s happened on Monday nights when the ACC brings in some of the best officials who usually work in the Big 12 and SEC. Kyle Filipowski, denied the potential game-winning free throws Saturday, was also punched in the throat at Virginia Tech on a Monday without penalty when a foul might have changed the outcome of that game — another Duke loss. Two of those officials were in New Orleans last April.
Among Saturday’s officials, only Lee Cassell works primarily in the ACC. Jeffrey Anderson and Tim Clougherty work primarily in the Big East, and all three typically work deep into the NCAA tournament. Anderson has been selected for the past five Final Fours and is among the elite in the profession.
So if there’s an issue, it’s a global one across college basketball, not confined to the ACC, which is as heavily invested in officiating as anyone. Which also doesn’t make what happened Saturday night any easier to swallow for anyone, because it flat out shouldn’t happen.
Either way, the ACC has to take steps to restore order, and another memo or statement isn’t going to cut it. The ACC had a theoretical officiating problem, fed and fomented by its own coaches, but after Saturday it’s a tangible one.
There are ways to address that — centralizing instant-replay reviews in Greensboro and giving officials access to the public-address system for explanations like the NHL or NBA — but none easier than this: The ACC needs to adopt the NCAA’s pool-reporter policy immediately, forcing its officials to explain calls like Saturday’s directly to the public.
If the NCAA can designate a member of the United States Basketball Writers Association — full disclosure: I’m currently the president of the USBWA — to speak to the officials and distribute a report when needed at every NCAA tournament game, as it has for years, there’s no reason the ACC can’t do the same.
The current ACC protocol, in which the home sports-information director is responsible for speaking to the officials, is unworkable. The home SID has too many responsibilities. By the time Virginia’s SID was asked for a pool report and finished with his postgame duties Saturday, the officials were already gone. Having a USBWA member assigned to the role beforehand would have simplified the logistics. We might have heard directly from the officials what they ruled and why, instead of everyone — including both coaches — left trying to figure out what had actually happened.
“I would just like some clarity,” Duke’s Jon Scheyer said afterward. “I hate it for our guys.”
A pool reporter wouldn’t necessarily have been helpful in some of the ACC’s other recent flare-ups — Kara Lawson didn’t accuse Florida State of providing a men’s ball until days after the game, and Hubert Davis’ and Josh Pastner’s complaints about free-throw disparities don’t reach the pool-reporter standard — but it only takes one incident like Saturday, one that calls the very bedrock of the standings into question, when any immediate accountability at all would salvage some of the ACC’s credibility, instead of further savaging it.
