Pac-10 Coaches Blow the Whistle

An overwhelming majority of Pacific 10 Conference basketball coaches believe the league’s officiating puts their teams at a disadvantage when it comes to postseason play.

“Our officiating is kind of a joke or mocked around the nation among coaches,” one Pac-10 coach said in a survey conducted by The Times.

Eight of the 10 coaches participated, each speaking on the condition of anonymity. One coach declined comment, and another did not return phone messages. The Pac-10 coaches are Arizona’s Lute Olson, Arizona State’s Rob Evans, California’s Ben Braun, Oregon’s Ernie Kent, Oregon State’s Ritchie McKay, Stanford’s Mike Montgomery, UCLA’s Steve Lavin, USC’s Henry Bibby, Washington’s Bob Bender and Washington State’s Paul Graham.

Among the coaches’ complaints:

* Games are officiated differently in the Pac-10 than in other conferences.

* Calls are unpredictable and inconsistent.

* The best officials work too many games and are not as sharp at the end of the season.

* The league’s by-the-book style of calling fouls does not adequately prepare teams for rough play in the NCAA tournament.

“We’ve softened up our conference this year, and we’ve already had a reputation for being that way,” another coach said. “We went the other way too much.”

But the Pac-10 is merely following the NCAA’s instructions to all conferences in order to crack down on rough play, said Lou Campanelli, a former coach at Cal who is in his first year as the league’s coordinator of men’s basketball officiating.

“It’s not like we had a choice; we were asked to do this,” he said. “If the coaches have a problem with that, those concerns have to be directed to the NCAA rules committee. . . . If games are going to be called in a different way in different parts of the country, that’s their business.”

Hank Nichols, who oversees all NCAA officials, said the notion that different standards are applied for different conferences is “bogus.”

“That’s just not true,” he said. “All you have to do is watch games from all over the country and you can’t tell the difference in the way they’re officiated.”

Nichols decides which officials will work the NCAA tournament, and he says he will pick those who adhered most closely to the standards set forth before the season. By that logic, the Pac-10 officials who were sticklers for the rules--the ones who tend to irritate coaches the most--could be chosen to make those same calls in the tournament.

Because officials are independent contractors who are paid by the game, it’s not uncommon for one to work in several conferences during the course of a season. The best officials get the most work, and all that time on the road, coaches said, can take a toll.

Nichols, a former official, said there isn’t much the NCAA can do about that. He pointed to the fact that, even if some officials might be fatigued as the season wears on, coaches all over the country still give them high marks.

“The coaches like to see these guys,” he said. “A lot of coaches have told me, ‘I’d rather have Official A tired, than Official B fresh.’ If a guy’s in shape and getting his rest, I don’t know if his quality of officiating is going to go down that much.”

To hear some Pac-10 coaches tell it, the quality of officiating can’t drop much lower. They say their players can’t crash the offensive boards or set a simple screen without drawing a whistle.

“In other leagues, they let you go screen a body instead of standing there and hoping somebody runs into you,” a coach said. “The point of emphasis was to get rid of moving screens. [But] we’ve gotten to a point where you’re so worried about making physical contact, that you don’t do anything. What you get is a lot of interchanges of players with no results.”

To Campanelli, though, the results are obvious. He says there have been no fights or serious elbow-throwing incidents in Pac-10 games this season, big men have been allowed to maneuver in the low post and guards have been able to cut to the basket without being knocked out of their shoes.

“This is not an exact science,” he said. “Do you think these complaints are any different than any other conference? No, absolutely not. What coaches want is consistency. We preach that, we strive for it every game. They want the same play called on one end and the other end. Believe me, we have tried with all our heart to do that.”

Five of the coaches surveyed said Pac-10 officiating is the worst in the country. Campanelli said he doesn’t buy into those kind of blanket statements. He said if those coaches saw the negative letters and e-mails that other conferences receive from fans, it would “knock their socks off.”

“I’ve watched some games in other conferences where I say, ‘My Lord, I’m glad our guys aren’t calling the games like that.’ Our guys are better than that. The grass is not always greener somewhere else. That’s a myth in the fans’ minds and, at times, in the coaches’ minds.”

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In Black & White

For the purposes of maintaining their anonymity for this story, the eight participating Pac-10 coaches have been assigned a number at random.

* Coach 1--”You play those teams from the Big Ten and the ACC and it gets real physical. You’re looking for those fouls and they’re not coming.”

*

“We can’t cut officials. In other leagues, you could say, ‘I don’t want John Doe in this game.’ We can’t do that. Sometimes, there’s just a personality conflict. I’ll see a guy walk on the floor and say, ‘Aw, damn, not this guy again.’ I’m unhappy with the guy, he gets a police escort off the floor, I can’t say anything, and there he is again the next week.”

*

“[The officials] are untouchables. They’re like God out there. It drives you nuts.”

* Coach 2--”The officiating has been the biggest disappointment this year. Lou’s [Campanelli, director of officiating] done a good job, but we’ve got a ways to go. It’s just so inconsistent that it doesn’t make sense.”

* Coach 3--”They’ve got incredible egos in that they want to make the big call or they can’t be talked to by whomever. And just calling fouls to be calling fouls.”

* Coach 4--”You’ve got good coaches and good players, but the officiating hasn’t improved.”

* Coach 5--”I don’t think they blatantly are inefficient, but I don’t think they understand when a team’s gaining an advantage physically, or when somebody’s hand checking.”

*

“I think they’ve done a good job of interpreting the rules. But I look at the TV and see that other leagues are not doing that. I watched a Big Ten game the other day and it was like a throwback from last year. If it gets to the tournament and all that stuff’s forgotten, then, no, we haven’t been prepared.”

* Coach 6--”We see some guys working night in and night out. You just know that they aren’t going to be on top of their games. It’s physically impossible.’

* Coach 7--”They’re trying to be true to the points of emphasis, and the problem is other conferences aren’t doing that to the same letter of the law.”

* Coach 8--”Our evaluations should count for something. That’s been the frustration of Pac-10 coaches before. I think Lou will help us be more communicative. . . . The most passionate thing that comes up every year is officiating. It gets everyone’s adrenaline flowing.”

*

BUBBLE MAY

NOT BURST

The loose feel of the NCAA men’s draw should help teams on the bubble, writes Chris Dufresne. D6