“How about a shuffle?” -Monte Goode, lead singer of the Honky Tonk Heroes Band. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays you can hear one of the better country music acts playing lower Broadway in Nashville, Tennessee from 6-10. They play at my favorite watering hole, The Wheel, the only honky tonk with flat screens above the bar, right down the street from the Sommet Center, home of the Nashville Predators. So if you’ve not figured out by now, I’m a country music fan, but first and foremost, I’m a sports guy who has decided to blog on my own. I do have my favorite teams, as does every person in the sports media, but unlike that show on cable, this really is a no-spin zone. I’m here to call things for it is, this will hopefully be a daily, and if something really gets me wound up then I’ll post twice. So enough of this, and it’s on to the good stuff.
Thumbs down this weekend to: NCAA Division I basketball officials. As an East Tennessee State University alum, I attended the Atlantic Sun Men’s Basketball Tournament this weekend in Nashville. The tourney should have been a preview to the porous officiating that has seemingly OVERRAN college basketball. In the games I eyewitnessed, the officials took the pattern of calling an overly large amount of fouls on one team during the first half, to the extreme of Lipscomb University having EIGHT FOULS called on them before the midway mark of the first half, to ETSU’s one, only to see the pattern reversed in the second half. This pattern held true at every game I saw, then during the ETSU/Belmont semifinal game I saw what was one of the most blatant attempts to manipulate the final outcome of a game I’ve ever seen, and it sadly worked. ETSU had a one point lead with approximately 20 seconds left in the game, when Belmont committed a foul on Kenyona Swader. The whistle blew, the Belmont player didn’t stop and Swader swung around to get him off of him. The official called a TECHNICAL at that juncture in the game, which caused a four point swing, and thus BU winning the game and going on to win the A-Sun tournament. The UCLA game goes without even speaking, that’s just a nightmare in itself. I’ve always been under these beliefs in the game, when you’re talking more about the officiating then you are the game itself, then there is something BAD WRONG, and while an official can never take full blame for costing a team a game, if you put yourself in that position, it will happen. I expect these things at the high school level, I can remember a few years ago in the VHSL Group A Division 1 football championship a VERY ERRONEOUS Unsportsmanlike conduct penalty was called on JI Burton High School with less than a minute to go in the game. The Raiders had just scored a touchdown and best I remember a two point conversion would have sent the game to overtime. Literally all the player did was throw the ball down and hug his teammates in the endzone, there was no taunting, no dance, anything. So basically, after what was an incredibly hard fought game between two really good football teams is remembered NOT for the game itself, but that one call. As in the UCLA game this weekend, the ETSU/Belmont game, and countless others the officials are becoming the story, and that needs to change. I really thought the Tim Donaghy scandal with the NBA would cause all sports, both at the professional and amateur level to take a very long, hard look at the way their officials are handled, and what can be done to ensure the integrity of the game, because while it is ultimately JUST A GAME (See UNC/Duke pregame ceremony, kudos to Duke for the handling of that), it’s something that the American people spend BILLIONS of dollars on, and the last thing that needs to happen is some Senate subcommittee to get involved. If and when that happens, I believe we’ll all be the losers.
