Last night, in the first MNF game of the season, the Patriots and Bills rocked old-school uniforms as part of one of the NFL’s “Legacy Games.” These matchups are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the original eight AFL teams this season. Usually throwback uniforms are pretty cool. Last night was no exception.

Except for the refs. The refs were subjected to these outfits:

As at least two bloggers (Sports Hernia, Tom Maz) have already pointed out, the refs are apparently doubling as the wait staff at TGI Fridays.

Now who wants some buffalo wings?

I had always figured that NBA officials were built by the same people who created the girl from “Small Wonder,” and that the unscrupulous Tim Donaghy was just an Agent Smith-like character who sought to rebuild the NBA as he saw fit. As an academic study reveals, though, they are imperfect beings from our world, born of flesh, encumbered by the same undesirable human faults as the rest of us.

NBA referees tend to favor home teams, teams trailing in a game and teams trailing in a playoff series, according to a study conducted by three economics researchers and published in The Oregonian.

The researchers cited “simple human psychology” as one of the reasons a referees might be inclined to favor one side.

It seems that ultimately, referees are sentimental teddy bears. The next time your team plays an away game and is slighted by a dubious offensive foul call, step back for a minute. Imagine a halcyonic moment the referee experienced as a child, just as you or I did. Maybe this official, the one who just called a charge on Tyrus Thomas, was five years old. His mother took him to the county fair. She takes him by the hand and asks him if he would like an ice cream cone, and yes! He would love an ice cream cone! He grins. Which flavor, sweetie? “Rainbow sherbet!” It’s his favorite! His grin grows wider still. His mother places the sugar cone in his little hands and smiles. He’s so excited. He’s so excited that he drops the cone into the dirt and the un-mowed municipal lawn. He’s embarrassed. He begins to cry.

Keep reading →

In keeping with today’s let’s-whine-about-the-NBA-refs-theme, NBC’s Ira Winderman writes:

So if there is a fourth referee in the building, one that rated high enough during the regular season to earn the trip and per diem, why not put him to work? Why not station him in the TV truck, where he can see all the angles that a mere six eyes on the court might miss? Why not provide an instant line of communication to the scorers’ table? Would it mean that games then would become officiated differently than during the regular season? Aren’t they anyway?

Sure! Why not? You could even set up some sort of admittedly arbitrary rule by which certain calls could get TV-ref oversight (say, flagrant fouls) — and certain calls don’t. (For whatever reason, I want the NBA’s refs to continue to struggle with block-charge.) But this is just a superficial, easy fix. The NBA is a difficult game to referee, but that doesn’t mean the quality of referees can’t get better. Here are two ideas how, the first of which belongs to Simmons, the second of which I’m pretty sure I first read about at TrueHoop, back before TrueHoop was ESPN’s TrueHoop:

1. Younger refs! Dick Bavetta is approximately 300 years old. He lost a footrace against CHARLES BARKLEY! What on Earth makes you think he can react fast enough to make split second decisions affecting the play of 250-pound athletes jam packed with fast-twitch muscles? He can’t. Nor can many of the aging refs that stalk the NBA’s sidelines. Younger refs, please.

Keep reading →

Yesterday, Bill Simmons wrote a Simmons-at-his-best column about NBA refs and how they’re killing interest in the sport, which is correct: By far the most prevalent complaint from the various respected basketball minds I follow on Twitter, and among friends with whom I watch the games, is about the NBA’s refs. They’re usually bad. This postseason, they’ve been awful. Simmons’s column takes that point, beats it into submission, and strangles it to death. It’s that good.

But there is that one stray paragraph that demands a quick response. Emphasis mine. Ahem:

The question remains: What’s wrong with a few rough fouls? Isn’t that an occupational hazard, no different than pitchers occasionally getting hit by line drives or defensemen getting nailed by slapshots? What’s wrong with the occasional shoving match where nobody gets hurt, or the wild roundhouse right that never connects? What are we afraid of? Why does hockey condone fighting and baseball still allows dugouts and bullpens to empty during brawls, but the NBA doesn’t allow glaring? If everyone else in society can butt heads from time to time, why can’t NBA players? What makes them a higher form of being? There’s no answer.

Actually, there is an answer for this! NBA players are, by a majority, African-American. Hockey and baseball players are much more frequently white. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

Why is fighting allowed in other sports and so tightly policed in the NBA? Because David Stern is afraid. He’s afraid that the affluent suburban white folks that are the economic engine for all of professional sports will see two NBA players fighting and dismiss them as “thugs.” These players might even be wearing headbands, and sporting tattoos. The sheer horror of it all could be overwhelming. So he does everything in his power to prevent this from happening, to keep people focused on the talent in front of them.

Keep reading →

Well isn’t this nice. Referees, in an effort to show what it’s really like to constantly be under attack and scrutiny out on the hardwood, invited their broadcasting critics out to the NBA’s annual referee camp in Jersey City. I imagine this moment is sort of like when the Berlin Wall came down, with the media playing the part of the GDR and the refs welcoming them over to West Berlin.

Yes, exactly like that:

The goal is not to get rid of criticism, but inaccurate criticism,” said Tim Frank, a league spokesman. “We think it’s hurtful when there’s an interpretation explained incorrectly and it makes the referees look wrong.”

[ ... ]

The media seminar conducted by Borgia and Bernie Fryer, the league’s vice president and director of officials, was designed to underscore the complexity of referees’ jobs: their proper positioning on the court; the subtle distinctions between charging and blocking fouls that sometimes can be discerned only in slow motion; and the differences between what they see on the court and what announcers witness at courtside (for TV crews) and beyond (for radio announcers who are often farther away).

Later, broadcasters explained the complexity of their jobs, in which they showed how to properly turn their necks to watch the action on the court and use that pen thing to draw on the screen.