B1G Game 14: Gophers Visit Ohio State (2-13-20)

[bbwannabe]

And the players from Ohio State are Big!

 

[CutDownTheNet]

Thanks!! I thought the same watching the game. It was deflating to watch this game; tough for the players I imagine. I hope next year the incoming height will help us and they are basketball savvy players.

I went back to record the one statistic that I neglected to look at earlier, and that may be one of the most telling stats for this particular game, namely personal fouls ...

Stat: Minn OSU
Personal fouls: 21 23
Players with 5 fouls: 0 1
Players with 4 fouls: 0 3
Players with 3 fouls: 5 1
Players with 2 fouls: 3 1
Players with 1 foul: 0 1
Players with 0 fouls: 1 2

Both teams played 9 players.

Minnesota’s 21 fouls were enough to foul out 4 players with one foul left over. If fouls hadn’t been managed, we would have closed out the game with one starter and four bench players. But Lindsay managed fouls (as best she could, under the circumstances of horrible refs), and no Minnesota player had more than 3 fouls. But there were 5 Gophers with 3 fouls. And the downside was that our players had to play “scared of fouls” for pretty much all of quarters 2-4, meaning that, unabated by any effective defense, Ohio State could make sufficient runs to take the lead for good.

The other downside was that these players minutes were limited. We see the result of these effects in the 99-point OSU score (although some credit goes to OSU, obviously, for shooting the lights out of their own gym).

OSU fouled out one player, and had three of their best players (Aaliyah Patty, Kirstan Bell, Jacy Sheldon) with 4 fouls. At the rate of foul accrual, if the game had gone 6 quarters (so to speak), then the Gophers might well have won it by virtue of OSU’s best players all fouling out, leaving our best players still playing with four fouls for sufficiently long to make up the point deficit.

Cumulatively, 21 + 23 = 44 fouls called in a 40-minute game. That’s 1.1 fouls per minute. And enough fouls to foul-out almost nine players among the two teams. Almost enough fouls to foul out two starting lineups!

And just ridiculous!

I recommend that the Big Ten fire those three refs (or at least put them on probation).

 

[Ignatius L Hoops]

Mark Zentz, Tina Napier and Ify Seales are not bad referees (although I don't recall seeing Ify Seales before). The Gophers playing "run alongside" defense and then bumping and/or hacking was far more troubling.

 

[Shades]

Cut, you always have a conspiracy theory going on about the refs. It’s just an excuse.

 

[60's Guy]

Regarding fouls, it’s coaching, not referees.
Each game it is critical to adapt to the rules of the night.
UConn commits the fewest fouls in the country. That is by emphasis. By coaching. Gophers at #149 in the country.
Watch our close outs on defense. I highly doubt we drill this, as just one example.

 

[CutDownTheNet]

Thinking about it a little more deeply, I actually agree (or at least partially agree) with most of the above comments. With few more insights just gleaned from further analysis and thought.

Regarding fouls, it’s coaching, not referees. ...
Watch our close outs on defense. I highly doubt we drill this, as just one example.

> Regarding fouls, it’s coaching ... Watch our close outs on defense. I highly doubt we drill this ...

Although I've not had the privilege to attend a practice, by my best guess I tend to completly agree with @60's Guy on this one. I strongly suspect that the Gophers preach defense, but do not train much on defense, let alone drill defense. For one thing, I believe that defense is one of the most difficult things to teach, and I suspect no more than one-in-ten basketball coaches knows how to train/drill defense.

Furthermore, I think it takes a lot of work (and thus time) to teach defense, so at this hectic time of the Big-Ten season, I suspect that most of the time has to go toward working on whatever the game plan is for the next team (and maybe a little bit of remedial learning just from watching film of the prior game), so not much time available to work on fundamentals such as defense. I think if you really want to do justice to teaching defense, you gotta not just sit in the film room, you gotta edit a DVD of defensive failures from the last game, then bring the DVD and 4K TV down to the practice gym, and actually set up mock versions of those plays with alterating people on offense/defense, and just more or less play around with that and try to figure out, what, if anything, could we have done better defensively (either to stay in front of our man better to not let them get that break into the paint, and/or to rotate-around help defense).

In spite of the fact that (at least in some circumstances) we are known for good help defense, it seems to me that about 75% of the time we do not do good help defense. Quite often we do awesome defense (in general) plus awesome help defense during the last 5 minutes of the 4th quarter - sometimes so good that I am astounded. But part of the problem is, you just can't maintain that level of energy for an entire game. Knowing that the locker room is 5 minutes away helps one put out a superhuman defensive effort for that last 5 min, but try that for a full 32-38 min of playing time (knowing we have a shallow bench so you're not going to get much rest) and that's a different thing.

If you listen to Gopher propaganda (a.k.a. Coach Whalen's talks and press briefings) you hear that we have an emphasis on defense. But I fear that said "emphasis" is not much more than the coach/assistant-coaches hollering at the team to play better defense - not much in terms of actual instruction, except for a few small things, such as lately I heard Whalen say they want to go iver all screens.

Then the insidious part is that at the same time that the players are being exhorted to play better defense, they are also being exhorted not to foul.

That might be somewhat OK in a game where the referees call it by the book. But in a game like the @Ohio State game where the referees are behaving on the extreme end of "calling a foul on every shot where the defender is somewhat close to the shooter" (something I mockingly call a "general vicinity foul"), then would-be Gopher defenders are placed into a classic Catch-22 situation. They are damned if they don't defend, and dammed if they do defend. Because under the latter situation, the offense is (with near certainty) awarded the and-one if their opponent makes the shot, or awarded two shots if they miss. The foul call is nearly automatic on the part of the refs. Only when there's two-feet of clear air between defender and shooter do they refrain from calling the foul. That's what I saw in that 3-minute highlight video. And of course, two feet of clear air between the would-be defender and the release of the shot is, by definition, not a good defense.

Then too, when you get a game like that where the referees seemingly blow the whistle on every other play (1.1 times per minute, actually), the players know (because they get yelled at for fouling) that they are going to the bench either immediatey or else at least soon if they foul (because fouls must be managed - as we saw from the stats that Whalen and assistants did effectively manage fouls among the 9 players that played). But they also know that they might go to the bench if they let their player get past them and don't even put in an effort to try to make a stop. So they let their player get by them (playing timid since they don't want to foul), and then they run beside their player to the hoop as they make a layup - and then get awarded the and-one even though they didn't even touch the player they were trying to defend.

This is, on the one hand, demoralizing to our players. They're trying to maximize defense within the constraints of minimizing fouls (per coaches' instructions on both counts), yet when the referees get into hyper-whistle-blowing mode (as they did at Ohio State) then this is an optimization problem that has no viable solution. The only way to solve that problem is to have a bench that goes 12-players deep such that you can just go ahead and tell your players to foul, if that's what it takes, because when you foul out we've got someone to take your place that is 90% as good as you are. But the latter does not apply to our team.

Given any set of whistle-happy refs such as @Ohio State, any opponent can easily beat us by either fouling out our entire team, or (in fear of the latter) inducing us to play so meekly and cautiously, that it's about as effective as no defense at all.

That's a real dilemma. That being said, we can also look at the Gopher defense for that game and definitely say that we could have played a much better defense, even within the Catch-22 constraints that existed. But then that brings us right back to @60's Guy's point of lack of substantial defensive training (and I don't care how much you cajole the team to defend better, without defensive training, those are empty words). Plus the short bench; which largely boils down to some injuries, plus two players leaving mid-season.

One poster made the point that (except for the occasional burst of defensive brilliance during some last-5-minutes-of-games, I would argue) in reality this team only gives lip service to defense, but is actually no better on defense than a Marlene team.

Each game it is critical to adapt to the rules of the night.

> Each game it is critical to adapt to the rules of the night.

This is a crucial point. (As we'll see below from some personal-foul statistics) there is a wide range, from game to other game, of how liberally or conservatively (we'll call it) or in general, how accurately to the actual rulebook that the referees assigned to the game actually officiate the game. We won't worry at this point in the argument, about the cause of this effect. Whether the refs are just having a bad day, or one of the refs is a novice, doesn't matter for practical purposes.

The practical fact of the matter is, the rules of *this game* may only have some approximate resemblance to the rules in the NCAA Women's Basketball rulebook. The rules as being called by those three refs are all that matters at the moment. Those three refs are "dictators of the basketball court." Unlike what our U.S. Constitution provides us citizens, there are no checks and balances provided. There are no separate Executive and Congressional and Judicial branches (e.g., the latter doesn't exist for you to appeal your case to). (As an aside, I sometimes wish that, like volleyball, each coach had one challenge per quarter - but people would argue it would slow down the game, which is true.)

During the time I played basketball, I never quite got the above point through my thick skull. I wish somebody had taken me aside and given me a lecture on it. The point is, as a player you need to have some special focus (during the 1st quarter particularly) on how the referees are calling this game with respect to several important categories, such as hardly-ever calling fouls versus giving away fouls like candy at a parade, or how loose or tight they call traveling. And then based on what you observe of the referees (and/or what your coaches observe) you absolutely need to adapt your behavior to the rules du jour. Every game is an optimization problem in that respect. You need to optimize your own game behavior so as not to "get had" by instances in which you played by the rulebook but that are not in accordance with the referees' rules-of-the-day.

One good example of this is, running alongside a dribbling player. I've seen teams win a game by the simple end-game strategy (when their opponent already had 5 fouls in the 4th quarter) of dribbling back and forth, left-to-right-and-back along the three-point line, when they knew that the refs were highly likely to award a foul for that (in spite of no contact or questionable contact). They'll even lean-in a bit to assure that the foul is called. If they're a good FT shooting team (like the Gophers, I might add) then they can get 1.5 points per possession down the stretch. Hey, it beats the heck out of stalling, since you pretty much get guaranteed free throws and you're effectively burning up clock while side-to-side dribbling anyway.

That's just one example, but there are many. I've seen a couple games this year in which 3X the number of traveling calls were awarded as in a normal game. Now some of these were legit calls, but I made it a point to observe carefully, and I noticed that of these 3X the number of traveling calls, about half or more of the calls were definitely not traveling according to the rulebook definition of traveling. In a game like that you're almost better off starting the dribble while at rest, since otherwise there's a 50/50 chance that they'll call traveling on you, even though you didn't. I think some refs have trouble keeping track of the pivot foot.

Anyway, if you think that learning defense isn't difficult enough, then try to learn, on top of the latter, the "acting skills" (I'll call it) such that you are playing in a manner so as not to exercize the types of behavior that are likely to trigger a referee to make (what should otherwise be known as) a bad call against you; and to promote the referees to make (what should otherwise be known as) a bad call against your opponent. You quite literally have to think about such things as, "what type of on-court behavior triggers those refs to make bad calls" and how do I behave so as to avoid such (a call) on myself, and promote such (a call) on my opponent.

It's a tough thing to do - but I think that the players need to be reminded of this regularly. Half-time instructions should include comments such as "the refs are doing x-and-such so you should do (or not do) y-and-such."

UConn commits the fewest fouls in the country. That is by emphasis. By coaching. Gophers at #149 in the country.

> UConn commits the fewest fouls in the country. That is by emphasis. By coaching. Gophers at #149 in the country.

This is really the flip side of the same coin (i.e., point) made by @60's Guy - namely that teaching defense does not (in spite of media publications to the contrary) seem to be a big "point of emphasis" for the Gophers (and I'm talking WBB here, although for all I know a similar statement might apply to MBB). The proof of the pudding is the above-cited statistic, which we'll look at in some depth.

In 24 games (as of daytime 2/17/2020) UConn has committed 266 personal fouls for an average of 11.083 PF per game. Their opponents have committed 354 personal fouls for an average of 14.750 PF per game. That's a margin of 3.667 fewer fouls per game for UConn than its opponents.

(While we're talking about UConn, let's also note that they have a (to their good) per-game rebound margin of 8.54 (with 42.8 rebounds per game), an assist margin of 6.375 (with 18.5 assists per game), a turnover margin of 1.54 (with 14.2 turnovers per game), and a blocks margin of 2.29 (with 5.17 blocks per game).)

In comparison, the University of Minnesota WBB program has logged (in its first 25 games) 415 personal fouls for an average of 16.56 PF per game, with a standard deviation of 3.176. This is for the entire 25 games thus far. It doesn't vary much between Big-Ten and non-conf seasons (mean 16.21 and 17, respectively) so we can stick to talking about full-season statistics.

UConn's average 11.083 personal fouls per game is 5.477 fewer fouls per game than Minnesota's 16.56. Putting it differently, Minnesota commits 1.5X as many fouls per game than UConn, on average.

Minnesota's opponents log only a fraction of a PF more per game, whereas UConn beats its opponents in that stat by 3.667.

It turns out that the distribution of Minnesota personal fouls across its 25 games is fairly close to a normal distribution (perhaps with slightly fatter tails, but calling it normal is good enough for government work). Calling it about normal, that means that typically no more than 16% of the games would have a Minnesota PF count greater than the sum of the mean and the standard deviation = 16.56 + 3.176 = 19.376. That means it would be somewhat rare (yet would occasionally happen) for Minnesota to get 20 or more personal fouls assessed against the team.

It turns out that six games (out of 25, or about a quarter of them) have PF count at 20 or greater - a bit more than the normal estimate, so as noted above, similar to normal but more fat-tailed. Here are the actual data points: {11, 11, 13, 13, 14, 14, 14, 14, 14, 15, 15, 17, 17, 17, 18, 18, 18, 18, 19, 20, 20, 21, 21, 21, 21}. The median is 17, which jibes with the mean of 16.56.

In the @Ohio State game, the Gophers were assessed 21 personal fouls (with another 23 for the Buckeyes, thus the total of 44 assessed by the referees for the game). This 21 ties with the maximum of 21 for the season. In other words, it's not like this is an extremely rare event, on the other hand it is outside the plus/minus one standard deviation relative to the fat-tailed-normal-ish frequency distribution. On the 25 games so far, it was equally likely to get about 11 or 12 personal fouls assessed to the team.

Think about the breadth of that range in the PF frequency distribution for a moment. That's almost (but not quite as wide as) a range from X to 2X (with X being about 11). Put another way, the PFs assessed to the Gophers this season range from a UConn-like low of 11 per game to almost double that.

Now we have to acknowledge two sources of variation in the number of fouls assessed in a given game. One is the fact that one or both teams may be more foul-prone in a given game. That accounts for part of this wide range of PFs assessed. But the other factor is the one of "how the referees are calling the game." We already acknowledged the fact that once you're in a game and the clock is ticking, the referees are the dictators, and how they call it is the "effective" rules of that particular game, regardless of how much said officiating may or may not resemble the actual NCAA rulebook.

I would avow that the reason for the @Ohio State personal fouls assessed against Minnesota hitting the season peak of 21 fouls has both sources of variation in that result. Certainly, we can't argue against the assertion that the Gophers didn't play good defense in that game. That being the case, one might think that perhaps the Gophers may have committed a few desperation fouls that would bump its PF count somewhat higher than the minimal 11-ish. On the other hand, I also argue that the way that referees Mark Zentz, Tina Napier and Ify Seales chose to officiate that game (the other factor) was a large share of the causal effects that pushed the Gopher PF total to 21 - matching the highest we've seen this season.

... The Gophers playing "run alongside" defense and then bumping and/or hacking was far more troubling.

> The Gophers playing "run alongside" defense and then bumping and/or hacking was far more troubling.

I will agree with that one 100%. You just can't win a game with that kind of defense - and I think that holds true regardless or how "good" or "bad" (so to speak) the referees are. In fact you could construct a reasonable arguement that claims that officiating was a moot point in the @Ohio State game - and that that game was in the L column, just given the type of defense (if you can call it that) used, and whether or not OSU shot the lights out. I'll tentatively concede that one, yet I think there are additional referee-related lessons to be learned here.

Mark Zentz, Tina Napier and Ify Seales are not bad referees (although I don't recall seeing Ify Seales before). ...

In spite of the significance of the point already discussed, namely "Each game it is critical to adapt to the rules of the night," I argue that we're setting the bar too low for the game of college basketball by settling for referees that, in any given game, may choose to over-enforce some rules and under-enforce some other rules - such that you never know til after the game starts, exactly what kind of referees you’re up against, and thus how closely the game you are playing actually resembles basketball. I aggree that the latter quote about the refs deciding the rules for each game is "the way things actually are" but I refuse to accept that we should just allow ourselves to settle for that.

Above, we've got somebody as respectable as Iggy making the statement that the referees at the Ohio State game are not bad referees. Now they may be fine referees on other nights as far as I would know, but their performance might vary from game to game (and/or perhaps Ify Seales is a bit iffy), so I will assert again, on this particular night they were pretty much horrible referees. They were handing out personal fouls against the defense with near certainty any time an offensive player drove into the paint. And in doing so, handing 21 PFs out to Gopher players - 10 more than our minimal fouls and matching our maximum fouls in any game this year not to mention 23 more handed out to OSU - likely a max fir them too). What I saw in the highlights clip looked like bad call after bad call to me, starting with the body check to Masha that wasn't called, and extending to the many seemingly-no-contact run-alongside fouls.

Again, I already conceded that the run-alongside defense is not a genuine defense in any sense of the word. Any given such play was lost long before the Gopher player trotted alongside the player breaking into the paint (maybe they were part of the press corps and were trying to get a good picture of their opponent's success and their own defensive breakdown?).

Unfortunately, one can never be sure in the case of questions about officiating (and thus I can't be certain of whether what I thought I saw was what actually happened), because what you really need in order to be sure about it, is 4K video playable at 1/4 speed to double check what really transpired in the play, and from about 4 different angles to boot.

And that makes obvious one part of the problem, really. Basketball officiating is really, really difficult (I'm guessing) because you're expected to make split-second decisions on was it a foul, or not, when you may or may not have a clear line of sight to the play. And then, do you call it ir defer to a co-ref wha may have had a better view. It’s really pretty complicated, actually.

People will gripe if you have a late whistle, but in reality, every whistle ought to be late because the best way to do it, really, is for the refs to give themseves a half-sec or so to think through what they think they saw, and maybe even eyeball their co-refs to see which way they're leaning before actually blowing the whistle. It's just a really tough job to do.

And because of that, compromises are made. One of the compromises I see stems from what I call "lazy ref syndrome" although that's just a euphemistic term I've adopted to symbolize the problem, and I don't really want to assert that the refs are actually lazy people (so please hold your flame posts in check).

But what I'm saying is that on a lot of potential calls, the referees don't actually (e.g., the "lazy" part of my euphemism) first look at what actually happened in the play, and then make their decision (call/no-call) accordingly, but rather they strive for consistency in calls, and thus they instead make their calls not based on what actually happened, but on their estimate of what typically happens under similar circumstances. This is partly a reaction to those who want consistency, but I claim that yes, it gets you consistency all right - but consistently bad officiating. Because the result is not actually refereeing the game per se, but rather applying a set of general rules of thumb (that are not very accurate relative to reality) and blowing the whistle accordingly.

That's the type of thing that's going on when they "consistently" call every one of those "weakly defending the player by running alongside them to the basket but with no contact" plays a foul on the running-alongside defender.

I conjecture that they didn't call it a foul because they actually saw some body contact; rather, they called it a foul because the scenario their rule of thumb: "always assess a foul if a defensive player is in the general vicinity of a shot, because (sic) history has proven (so they think) that 9 times out of 10 a foul is actually is committed in this case." I call this a "general vicinity foul." You see lots if general vicinity fouls called, even in games with fairly decent refs.

Taiye gets assessed with "general vicinity fouls" all the time. I wager that approximately half of her assessed personal fouls are actual fouls, and the other half are fictitious fouls that are invented by the referees (in their wacko interpretation of the rulebook for the given game). She gets (so far) an average of 3.17 fouls per game in an average of 28.875 minutes per game. In other words, she plays almost 3 of the 4 quarters total, spread out over 40 minutes, with the bench time mainly coming from the fact that she gets benched the first time in any given quarter that she gets her "maximum allowed" one foul for the quarter, because we need to keep her fouls well managed so as to keep her from fouling out.

There is a double-whammy effect of the referees calling (half her fouls as) bogus calls, namely that she has to play more timidly than she otherwise would, and think twice about doing a block (which she's good at). If she magically had half the fouls starting tomorrow (e.g., via the referees calling her defensive plays by the rulebook), does anyone doubt that (a) she'd be able to play more agressively and (b) Whalen would play her for about 37 minutes per game (assuming she didn't get exhausted)? So the net effect of referees incompetently calling Taiye’s defensive plays is to cut down her impact on the game by as much as half. She’s actually one of the best defenders on the team, that is, when the referees don’t force her to bench prematurely due to their foul calls against her that are not actual fouls. Many of those bogus calls are general vicinity fouls.

It's these indirect effects of what some (namely I) might call bad officiating (and that others might just sigh and say, well that's the officiating we're stuck with and against that weakened standard, Mark Zentz, Tina Napier and Ify Seales are in the middle of the pack, quality-wise, and thus they are "not bad."

I claim that, against the absolute standard of the NCAA WBB rulebook, almost all of the referees are pretty darn bad. And athough I know that it's a difficult job, I claim that given some training and guidance from the NCAA/Big-Ten they could get better over time.

I'm really serious when I say that I've seen some horrible officiating this year, and that's against the absolute standard of the rulebook.

Here's some of the things I've seen recently. Masha was dribbling baseline to the basket with the referee not more than 8 feet away from her. After the play ended, per discussion with a neighboring fan (since we both had a jaw-dropping WTF moment over the play), we determined that the only plausible explanation was that the baseline ref thought that his job consisted entirely of just staring at the baseline to check for any feet going out of bounds. Because what really happeed was that Masha was stiff-armed out-of-bounds by the defender on the opposing team. Yeah sure, she stepped out of bounds all right - and so the out-of-bounds-line-watcher referee duly called it out of bounds on Minnesota, and called it a turnover. But there was the little matter that the defense violently forced her out of bounds with the huge shove. You could see that just from the fact that Masha's body motion violated the laws of physics (under the bogus hypothesis that she voluntarily steered herself out-of-bounds) in terms of making a sharp 90-degree turn with no force applied by her feet to do so, thus it took some other force (the opponent's shove) to cause her to go out of bounds. How does the referee 8 feet away miss this? That's incompetence at its finest. And how do the other two refs miss this, in spite of the fact that anybody im the Barn (that’s not behind a rafter) could see it clearly from afar? We conjectured that the other two refs were calling it “not my job, man.”

Just recently, in an away-from-the-ball play, a defender stiff-armed Taiye, and pushed her right on her keister. Is that what "normal" post play has devolved to? Should we just be honest and start calling it football. But besides the big shoves, our post players are typically enduring lots of uncalled little shoves all night long.

Note that on some of the home games I made it an explicit point to watch out for particularly "bad" fouls called (or not called) by the referees. I wasn't looking for the run-of-the-mill bad calls, but the extremely onerous ones. The potentially game-changing bad calls. Also, to the best I could accomplish (given being a Gopher fan) I put on my "impartiality hat" - looking for bad calls in favor of either team.

Quite interestingly (I thought), I observed that the number of really bad calls always favored the opponent, and went against us. That's intriguing since the NCAA (in its RPI calculation) pretty much acknowledges that there's a home-team advantage by counting an away win for more than a home win, and counting a home loss for more than an away loss. Presumably that alleged advantage is thought to be from more than having lots of fans there to cheer you on or familiarity with your own hoops. In other words, I think they concede that there might be a little bit of referee bias in favor of the home team - not much but at least some.

Counter to that, my little obseration experiment showed that our home referees were more likely to favor the visitor with their bad calls (or lack-of-call when there should have been one).

Specifically, there were 3-4 (I can only approximate since I can never be completely sure that what I thought I saw was what actually happened, given sight-lines etc.) games in each of which there were 3-4 (varying by game) extremely bad calls that went against the Gophers and resulted in loss of points that we otherwise would have gotten, or else easy points for the opponent (that were in place of what otherwise would have been their average points per possession, say) such that the net result was about 3 more points for the opponent and 3 less points for the Gophers - a net dufferential of about 6 points. And the bottom line is that these were all in games that we either lost by about 2 points or so, or else (in at least one case) lost by more but due to having to intentionally foul (versus the opponent needing to intentionally foul us otherwise).

In other words - and this is just probabilistically speaking, since we can't rewind the clock and replay the conclusions of these games only with a different set of (non-horrible) referee calls - the occurrence of this relatively small number of really, really bad calls by the referees all favoring our opponent, quite literally cost us those games - about 3-4 close home games to be specific (I didn't try the experiment for away games since I didn't have access to video of sufficient quality).

Our Big-Ten conference record, which now stands (before the Michigan State game) at 5-9 quite literally "should have been" either 8-6 or 9-5 depending on whether there were 3 or 4 such close losses that quite literally had their outcomes swapped by these extremely bad calls by the referees.

Now I know that one might well say something like, "well that's the way the ball bounces and your team needs to be good enough to somehow pull out the win in spite of the bad luck." Well, that's true in a sense, I suppose. Except that in many of these cases the really bad calls happened in the 4th quarter when there wasn't much time to react and up your play a notch to get the win in spite of the bad luck.

Again, I go back to the point that, although we know that referees can't be perfect because its a tough job, and we know that in each games the specfic referees will put a little twist on the rules (and tough luck, you have to live with that), on the other hand these very-bad calls that I observed and tallied were all such horribly bad calls, that it was just unbelievable that they called it that way, and there was no way to explain it away by saying that it's just their interpretation of the rulebook in that specific game.

In those particular cases, there's really no other way to describe it other than to say that the referees stole those Wins from us and wrongly put the games in the Loss column. It was that bad.

Then too, think about the parity in the Big Ten this year. By parity we don't mean that each team is about equally capable. More like it, is that there are about 4 teams at the top of the Big-Ten ranks that are very good, and about 3-4 teams at the bottom of the Big-Ten ranks that are pretty much bad relative to the others, and about 6-7!teams in the middle that are all quite good and relatively equally good among those 6-7.

That being the case, if I tell you that partly thanks to the parity among the middle-six B1G teams implying that you're going to get some very close games among those teams, but that (what actually happened was that) bad refereeing in a few of those close games threw the game in the direction that the referees tilted the scales, then what that actually means is that a Big-Ten team (namely the Gophers) really ought to have had a 9-5 or 8-6 record (to date), but instead (thanks to incompetence by some specificic referees in some specific play calls in some specific games) got a 5-9 record (to date) instead. It's the difference between a guaranteed invitation to the NCAA playoffs and that invitation being a nearly impossible eventuality - all thanks to some specific horrible calls by specific referees in specific games.

Now I know that LIndsay Whalen would say something like "we should have played better" in those games, and that's politically correct and fine for her.

But I'm here to say that if we're going to have that close of parity in capabiilties of Big-Ten teams, then in order to fairly distinguish among them as to which of these teams should make the playoffs, then we also need parity in officiating. Which we don't have. And I'm not sure how to get such parity in officiating, although I might think of a few referee-educational things that we could maybe try.

Cut, you always have a conspiracy theory going on about the refs. It’s just an excuse.

> Cut, you always have a conspiracy theory going on about the refs. It’s just an excuse.

No, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's just the facts of the matter.

Who could it be a conspiracy by? It's not a conspiracy by me just to make things up. I'm only reporting the facts - along with my chosen emphasis of saying, "folks, there's something wrong here - it's just not right."

It's not a conspiracy by the referees. They don't have a meeting before any given game to decide which team they want to throw the game to. Rather, it's really just a set of random events, namely a stream of plays in a game (what really happened) along with choices by referees in how to call those individual plays. And in an ideal world, there might be some magic method by which the referees could call all those plays correctly, and by the rulebook. But we just don't have that world.

Instead we have a world in which the calls by the referees are partly correct and partly random. And in such a stream of partly random calls, usually one team or the other is the net beneficiary. It's totally random as to who is the beneficiary in any given game.

(Note: I’ve been to many D1 St. Thomas away games at arch-rival St. Bens in which the referees’ tilt of the calls was definitely not random, but that’s a story fir a different day.)

And in fact, it's just an outlier statistic that the random results of who got benefitted by those close Minnesota games happened to be that the opponent benefitted to the extent of winning a game that they otherwise likely would have lost. Totally random. No conspiracy at all.

Now next year, it may go the other way. The Gophers might (in 2020-21) be the beneficiary of some Wins that they otherwise might have Lost just due to some really bad calls by officials at key junctures of close games.

In either case, there's no conspiracy by anybody. Just the laws of probability and random numbers having the effect that they may have, from time to time.

The only way to counter such effects (of bad officiating distorting Won-Loss records of Big-Ten teams) is by getting better officiating. I think it's worth the effort. We shouldn’t settle for crappy officiating just because we know that it’s difficult for referees to improve their calling of games. We should at least try to achieve some incremental improvement in BigTen basketball officiating.

Otherwise (if we can't fix or at least slightly improve this problem of bad-refereeing distorting game results and thus distorting who gets to go to the NCAAs), then as much as we like Gopher basketball, we might just as well go to Canterbury and bet on the horse races.