No surprise here. But, we’ve got some “news” that you already knew…
…the Atlantic Coast Conference is home to the worst officials in the country as now proven by instant replay.
All fans of all schools think that their officials are “the worst”; it is just the nature of being a fan. But, fans of the Atlantic Coast Conference have long suspected that crews led by Jim Knight, Jack Childress, Ron Cherry, and the other stripes in our conference were the worst of the worst. Now they have proof to support their thoughts as ACC officials have experienced an NCAA worst 50% reverse rate in conference games using instant replay. You can click here to see more about this.
* Here is a scary thought — these figures don’t include two screw ups that happened in the Florida State @ Boston College games where the replay officials missed obvious calls!!!
* I think one of the best things that ever happened to me as a sports fan was to live out of the Atlantic Coast Conference region (in Houston, TX) over the last 4+ years. Following other teams, going to other stadiums, experiencing other experiences has helped expand and round out my perspective on a myriad of topics — from gameday experiences, to athletics management, to fan behavior, to officials. Allow me to say that this recent revelation does not surprise me in the least.
* I watched a VSPN report on Oustide the Lines last week about instant replay in college football. One very interesting item that was revealed in the report was how officials often intentionally review a play that they can justify as looking close, but that really isn’t. Their self-gratifying goal is to prove to the fans that they are much more accurate than you really believe.
* I’ve got a very important comment for you not to forget in the coming weeks — expect ACC games to experience an abnormally large spike in reviews of plays that really don’t need reviewing.
The conference will be embarrassed by this statistic and will retreat into a “justify and rationalize” mode as opposed to taking a critical look at the performance of its officials. The answer will be to inflate the denominator by increasing the amount of reviews of plays that really don’t need reviewing to ultimately improve its ratio. Anybody remember the reviews in Carter-Finley in Thursday night’s game? What a joke.
