Hometown Calls Aren’t That Rare

Imagine UCLA losing to USC on a questionable official’s call, then, at game’s end, that referee joining the Trojans in singing the alma mater.

UCLA is outraged, so it complains to Verle Sorgen, the conference’s coordinator of football officiating.

Sorgen says he’ll review the matter.

Sorgen is a USC graduate.

We present this hypothetical only to illustrate the almost unavoidable cross-pollination that takes place across the country on football Saturdays.

Sometimes, things get dicey.

The Pacific 10 went 8-1 in nonconference games last week, but Utah Coach Ron McBride can assure you it should have been 7-2 in the wake of his team’s 23-17 loss to Arizona at Tucson.

Utah lost when an official ruled Ute receiver Josh Lyman’s knee was out of bounds in the back of the end zone as he hauled in the potential game-winning pass with 38 seconds left.

The lead official, Jim Fogltance, happens to live in Tucson and has two degrees from Arizona.

McBride couldn’t hold his tongue.

“He’s a big UA guy,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune after the game. “He lives there and has always been a big supporter of theirs.”

Also working Saturday’s game was referee Bob Beal, a former Arizona lineman.

After a phone call from Mountain West Conference Commissioner Craig Thompson, McBride issued a public apology. He still maintained the referees blew the call, but admitted he should not have singled out Fogltance, who was not involved in the controversial play.

Still, was Fogltance’s crew watching out for Arizona?

Who could suspect such a thing?

“Only people with evil minds,” Sorgen said in a phone interview this week.

Fogltance, a retired principal, has been a referee since 1978. Sorgen noted that earlier in the Utah-Arizona game, officials gave Utah a break when they ruled a receiver down on an apparent Arizona fumble recovery.

“We’ve never had a problem,” Sorgen said of boosterism charges. “The flap at Arizona is not a problem either. This is something Coach McBride seized upon.”

Fogltance’s track record?

An Arizona columnist did an archive search and discovered that Fogltance had worked several Arizona games in which questionable calls cost the Wildcats. In 1999, Fogltance’s crew flagged Arizona for 16 penalties in a close loss at Oregon State.

Yet, there is no denying the perception problem. Before Sorgen took over in 1986, the Pac-10 did not allow officials with local ties to work traditional rivalries such as UCLA-USC or Cal-Stanford.

Sorgen let that rule slide, though, and now all 42 Pac-10 officials are free to work any game. Sorgen says allowing Pac-10 officials to work local games makes logistical sense.

“The scheduling would be atrocious otherwise,” he said.

As for McBride’s gripe? You understand why he was fuming mad in the aftermath of an emotional defeat, but he was wrong to turn a possible blown call into Oliver Stone’s next film project.

The problem is a lot of people involved in college sports attended college somewhere. Can anyone be trusted?

Tom Hansen, the Pac-10 commissioner, is a Washington graduate. Jim Muldoon, the league’s director of media relations, went to Notre Dame.

Every week in college football, a sportswriter somewhere chronicles the football exploits of his alma mater.

You would think, or at least hope, that professionalism would trump allegiances in these cases.

Do those two Arizona graduates who worked last weekend’s game wish the Wildcat football program well?

Deep in their hearts, probably.

Did they conspire on a split-second, last-minute call to make sure Arizona preserved a key nonconference victory?

You make the call.

Pac Bits

This comes as a shocker, but Arizona Coach John Mackovic had another view of the controversial finish against Utah. “I thought it was an appropriate call,” Mackovic said. “Had they called it a touchdown, I might have been upset.”

Hey, look, Oregon State is back. A year after falling on their tails, finishing 5-6 in a season they were supposed to compete for a national title, the Beavers are 3-0 entering Saturday’s game against Fresno State in Corvallis. Five Pac-10 schools are ranked in this week’s AP top 25, but not Oregon State. “We haven’t played anybody yet, so we shouldn’t be up in the polls,” Coach Dennis Erickson said of his team’s wins against Eastern Kentucky, Temple and Nevada Las Vegas.

Erickson won’t need to deliver a pep talk to get his team ready for Fresno State, which upset Oregon State in last year’s opener, 44-24, in Fresno. It was a defeat from which the Beavers never recovered. “It affected us some,” Erickson said. “We were outplayed, outcoached, everything. We deserved what we got.”

Fair-weather Ducks. Get this: There actually are Oregon fans grumbling about Coach Mike Bellotti in the wake of former assistant coach Jeff Tedford’s remarkable first-year success at California. The thinking: If Bellotti would have given more control to Tedford, his former offensive coordinator, the Ducks would not have been in so many close games last year. Oregon finished No. 2 in both polls but the margin-of-victory component in the bowl championship series computers cost the Ducks a trip to the national title game. For what it’s worth, Bellotti’s 63 wins since 1995 are the most of any Pac-10 coach.