SEC Basketball is being Strangled by Poor Officiating

“I’m not blaming the refs BUT” has become a mantra among SEC basketball fans. How much longer must these teams be forced to contend with such wanton awfulness?

There is absolutely no way around it. SEC refs are terrible, inconsistent, and play way too big of a role in the outcome of games. Texas A&M fans are upset about charge calls. Arkansas fans are still pissed about…every game. Georgia fans are still complaining about their game against LSU.

This isn’t your typical “hurr durr the refs are cheating” type of calls. It’s just bad officiating, across the board. Let’s take a look at the last 3 games for the Arkansas Razorbacks, since this is a Razorback focused site. BUT MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT, you could EASILY go look at the last 3 games for any SEC team and find these same type of problems.

Arkansas vs Kentucky 

I guess I should start off by saying that the officiating didn’t cost us this game. Our poor shooting did, simple as that. Kentucky played great perimeter defense and forced lots of bad shots. But do you know what didn’t help the Hogs on this night? Officiating.

Overall, there were 48 fouls called in this game. That is ridiculous. Tyler Ulis had 24 points on the night. Sounds like he was on fire, until you see that he was 14/15 from the free throw line on the night. How does that happen? This was the game that Razorback fans got introduced to the legendary Karl Hess.

Hess WAS an official from the ACC. I say “was” because he was fired for saying racist comments to a spectator. Of course, according to the ACC, they fired Hess for cumulative incidents, including the time that a conference had to publicly reprimand an official for ejecting fans.

Basically, Hess is a mess. A hot mess of Hess. And of course he’s in the SEC now, where he’ll fit right in with these other goofballs. Just for good measure, here’s a Grantland article with the 50 best tweets about Karl Hess. (Warning: Language…also I miss you Grantland.)

Arkansas vs Georgia

Hogs lose another close one, with lots of questionable and inconsistent calls. How many times in regulation did the officials call a body check on either team? Often. Like, anytime anyone ever touched anybody. Then, all of a sudden it’s overtime, and the refs decide to just let the teams play. So of course there are no fouls called in any situation.

Seriously, I did the math. In regulation, this game averaged a foul a minute. A FOUL A MINUTE. Then in overtime, there are only 2 fouls called until the 1:07 mark. TWO. What happened? Either you were calling too many in regulation (you were) or you weren’t calling enough in overtime. Either way, this lack of consistency not just between officiating crews, but even between possessions, is a problem.

There were 46 fouls called in this game, by the way. 9 of them in OT. So, not as many overall fouls as the Kentucky game, but definitely a lack of consistency.

Arkansas vs Texas A&M

THERE WERE 50 FOULS CALLED IN THIS GAME.

Sorry I yelled. But come on! 50 fouls in 40 minutes? Don’t you think that maybe….JUST MAYBE….you’re calling too many fouls? I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, either. Aggies were upset about the charge call late in the game. Hog fans were upset about the 3 point foul call on Watkins. It was universally bad.

Even people with no stake in the game were chiming in online.

It’s been said that if you’re a ref, and the fans know you’re name, then you’re not a good ref. Well, that is USUALLY true, unless you’re Pat Adams. There isn’t a referee in college basketball that wants you to know his name more than Pat Adams.

Check out this video of him giving a technical foul. There isn’t a doofier, sillier, look-at-me-ier referee that I’ve seen. From the over exaggeratted travelling motions, to the excessive whistling, to his over the top hand gestures, Pat Adams has it all. Wait that’s not right….is terrible. That’s it. Pat Adams is terrible.

That last tweet is the problem, really. There’s no punishment for being bad at your job if you’re a ref. Now, in order to get to the point to where you’re officiating SEC games, you are probably better than most refs in the country. Which is why I’m justified for screaming at the refs while watching a jr. high basketball game.

IF THE REFS WERE ANY GOOD, THEY’D BE IN THE SEC INSTEAD OF KARL HESS.

More razorbacks: Trying to Figure Out this Arkansas Basketball team

I don’t know what the answer is to this problem. The reason you can’t just punish refs for missing calls is that it’s the ref’s job to decide if a foul is warranted. You can call a foul on just about every play. That’s why being a ref is hard. But that’s not an excuse for the inconsistencies we see in the SEC.

If something is a foul on Tuesday, then it should be a foul on Saturday. Instead, if something was a foul on Arkansas it probably wasn’t on LSU. And that’s why there is the constant conversation on twitter about these #SECRefs. Why can’t such a rich conference do better? Why is a guy that got fired from other conferences a ref in our league?

Too many questions, not enough answers. And certainly no solutions.