I’ve got bad news for the SEC.
The cries and whines of league coaches — coupled with some high-profile blown calls — are giving the conspiracy theorists out there a lot of ammo.
Seems I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from folks who honestly believe the SEC office is telling league officials to help out the conference’s best teams.
I’ve got one problem with that idea: It’s laughably absurd.
The SEC is not in the business of telling its officials which teams to help and which teams to hurt.
In this day and age, when someone can’t even have a sexual encounter without it becoming national news, do you really think the SEC could keep a lid on a game-fixing conspiracy like this?
Do you really think the league sends in pseudo-officials to the biggest games, sort of like The Three Tramps in Dealey Plaza? Then they’re all hurried out of town before the coaches start squawking about a yellow flag flying from the Grassy Knoll.
Please. There is no way that any conference muckety-muck has ever said to a ref, “Hey, Joe, you know who’s higher-ranked… take care of ‘em.”
The lid couldn’t be kept on such a thing. Just use a little logic.
The SEC just suspended a crew for a pair of blown calls. If that crew had been told to aid Florida and LSU, couldn’t they go public now to save their own reputations?
Don’t you think that officials would be able to blackmail the league if ever just once they got the wink and the nod to “fix” a game?
How would the SEC ever fire or demote an official who had that kind of knowledge? The league would be at the mercy of dozens of zebras who would all be armed with info that could embarrass the league and call every result in SEC history into question.
It’s ridiculous.
And do you really think these officials have time on the field to make a decision based on uniform color?
Example: An official eyes the line of scrimmage. An offensive lineman is being pushed backwards and in a split second he has the oncoming rusher on the ground. The official goes for the flag to call holding, but — “Wait. That’s a Florida offensive lineman. I can’t throw a flag on the #1 team in the country and cost the league a shot at the BCS title game” — he leaves the flag in his pocket.
That’s nonsense, folks. Refs don’t have time to worry about rankings when they’re making bang-bang decisions.
Let’s look at the big calls in question:
1. The “celebration” penalty that was thrown against Georgia in the closing seconds of their home game against LSU. Both teams were undefeated and the Bulldogs were playing at home. Apparently “higher-ranked cooking” trumps “home-cooking,” for why else would the league try to help out LSU? (It was a horrible judgement call, yes, but not a fix. If it were a fix, LSU wouldn’t have been flagged for the same thing after their go-ahead score.)
2. The “unsportsmanlike” conduct call made against Arkansas that resulted in a Florida first down on their game-tying touchdown drive. The official in question said that he saw the hit from Razorback defensive tackle Malcolm Sheppard out of the corner of his eye and threw the flag. He’s admitted his error in assuming what had occurred to leave a Florida lineman lying on the field.
3. An interference call against Arkansas on the same drive. Sorry, folks, interference always has been and always will be a judgement call. If it goes against your team, it’s a bad call. If it goes for your team, the refs got it right. That’s a universal truth in Fan World.
4. The non-call on a replay that pretty clearly should have taken a Florida touchdown off the board against Mississippi State. There are a couple of issues with this one. First, is the booth official seeing ALL of the angles of the play that you are seeing at home? Second, a reversal requires concrete evidence that a call has been blown. The replay official in question might have decided to err on the side of the on-field refs who were closer to the action and might have had a better angle on the play. Like it or not (and I don’t), there’s still room for interpretation when it comes to the decisions of replay officials.
5. The non-call on Alabama’s Terrence Cody who took his helmet off after blocking Tennessee’s potential game-winning field goal. This made news for two reasons. CBS analyst Gary Danielson wondered at the end of the broadcast if that should result in a second kick for Tennessee… and Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin flat-out didn’t know the rule. Turns out, a “celebration” call is considered a dead ball foul and this one — had it been called — would have been enforced on Alabama’s next play, if the clock hadn’t run out. There would be no do-over kick, even if the foul had occurred in the first quarter. Alabama still would have had the football.
(Sidenote — From what I’ve been told, Danielson actually phoned an SEC official, asked him about the rule, and then apologized to the ref for stirring up something that shouldn’t have been stirred up.)
Are SEC officials having a bad year? Well, they’ve had some pretty controversial, high-profile calls that have been scrutinized by upset coaches.
But isn’t there more room for error than ever before? Go back 30 years. It’s 1979. Most games aren’t on television. Those that are don’t feature “super slow-motion” replays or dozens of camera angles. Referees have blown calls for years — they’re human, just like the players and the coaches — but we’ve never had the opportunity to see a bad call from an overhead camera in slow-motion until now.
This isn’t a sign that officiating is getting worse. It’s a sign that we’ve got more technology eyeballing the games, the plays and the refs than ever before.
And with all that media in place, it sure would be awfully hard for a league — which is made up of 12 equal-standing institutions — to conspire in favor or one or two of those schools at the expense of the other 10 or 11.
Stop the conspiracy theories, folks. Officials aren’t perfect. But they’re not a group of Manchurian Candidates, either.
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