Ethics Concerns in College Basketball Officiating

Once again, I feel compelled to make a comparison between college and high school. When living in Iowa during my professional baseball umpire career, I officiated games in the Division 3 Iowa Conference. I understand the different challenges of college with the increased speed, greater athletic ability, and play above the rim.

Unfortunately, from what I am hearing this year more than ever before, coaches are complaining whenever an official makes a call out of their primary coverage area. Let’s not allow the pressure of college coaches to prevent necessary calls from being made. My observations tell me that an increasing number of fouls that should be called are not being called. Excessive contact where one of the players is more at fault for the contact and his team benefits must be called when it is in your field vision cone. Yes, you should give your partner(s) a chance to call this contact, but do not let it go unwhistled because a coach might complain.

Once again, we must remember that coaches generally do not know the rules as wells as most officials. Coaches do not have trained officiating eyes. They watch the ball while we focus much of our officiating attention on defensive positioning and the feet of the player in possession of the ball.

MY BIGGEST CONCERN

Of a much greater concern is what I have begun hearing more often over the past couple years. Officiating supervisors at the college level are expecting officials to be aware of and adjust to the number of team fouls. Yes, you heard me correctly. Supervisors are not using the rulebook, official interpretations, and points of emphasis to primarily direct their teaching.

Having attended many University of Maine women’s bsaketball games over the past two years, I have seen blatant, even hard fouls not being called. Now that I have begun to focus on this potential misdirection, I have seen an obvous pattern in these occurrences. The foul that goes uncalled happens when the defending team has committed three or four team fouls more than their opponent. How can coaches agree to this? Maybe if coaches realized what officials are being told, they would begin to stop pointing to the team fouls on the scoreboard and solely share their opinions based on the contact.

I still will not and cannot charge any fellow official with cheating. But as officiating supervisors put pressure on the officials who wish to progress to higher levels in college play, their actions are not fair. In effect, supervisors are telling officials to change the way they officiate during a game. There is no rule support for this action and I call their directives highly unethical. I encourage college officials to share any printed documents and expose supervisors who demand that team fouls must be kept close.

Haven’t you seen or officiated games when there was a big discrepancy in team fouls in one half only to flip the other way in the second half? I credit teams in this situation for adjusting to the officiating and the rules of the game. Should we be helping the rough, less finesse teams when we don’t call fouls on a team that continue to foul and be rough beyond fair play? Officials must be the protectors of the game and guarantee that both teams have equal opportunity to win every game.

It is time for officials to put their integrity above their part-time college officiating dreams. Question your supervisors! Obviously these supervisors put their loyalty to those whose put them in their position above our great game of basketball. The game is much more important than their personal feelings and loyalties.

How can we allow the high school and college game to drift further apart when the rules are almost identical?

Hopefully those at the top of NCAA basketball can reign in and discredit those who seem to think that they have the right to change the rules!

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