Amid everything else that happened Saturday night, North Carolina’s win over N.C. State was the kind of game where fans on both sides walked away complaining about the officiating. Wolfpack fans pointed to the Tar Heels’ 39 free-throw attempts, while the opposite side felt Leaky Black was unfairly ejected for his hard foul that sent Terquavion Smith crashing to the floor.
Twas ever thus, some longtime ACC fans would say. Replacing a former UNC quarterback and athletic director with an Illinois grad as ACC commissioner didn’t quell any of the conspiracy theories, and more than one visiting coach has grumbled that he didn’t get any more calls in Cameron even without Mike Krzyzewski on the opposite bench, at least in the second half.
Officials have worked under tremendous, frame-by-frame scrutiny in the DVR, social-media era, and that’s been true for years now — as has the fact that those same tools, applied by evaluators instead of fans, mean that college basketball officials are more technically accurate than they’ve ever been, statistically speaking.
