When North Carolina’s Brady Manek fired an elbow into the face of Baylor’s Jeremy Sochan with 10:08 left in an NCAA Tournament second-round game Sunday, it sent the officiating crew working the game to the replay monitor with a big decision to make. Eject a key player from an elimination game, or assign a lesser penalty and play on?
Ultimately, the crew of Donnie Eppley, Kipp Kissinger and Brent Hampton made the right call: It was a flagrant 2 foul and Manek had to go. The strange part is everything that happened thereafter.
The game dissolved into a street fight, with Baylor implementing an extremely physical full-court press that reduced a 25-point deficit to a manageable number in shockingly rapid time. Rather than rein in the contact, the refs became bystanders. The Bears bumped and shoved and slapped, and the whistles did not blow—well, at least not against the aggressor that was playing desperately to get back into the game. The whistles blew many times against North Carolina.
