There were some awful calls down the stretch of that game but remember also they were lucky to even get to OT thanks to the bumbling Irish down the stretch. The womens game really needs to change their direction in regards to refereeing they have basically HS girls JV refs going the games, as i stated very clueless. Better training, more men (this will go over huge) who understand the game at the level they'd like to think they are playing it especially once they get to the tourney.
You make some interesting points.
What bothered me most friday and sunday were that when ND got down big, both times we saw a parade of phantom calls to keep them in the game. It's totally ok for refs to miss one call. This was basically systemic. They were unbelievably bad.
I agree that UConn and Miss St both played awful games. Neither better than a C, maybe a B- for Miss St just because of the 2nd qtr. But it was still egregious. And how the NCAA hasn't lambasted that crew for boggling the last 10 seconds is just a terrible look (although not as bad as when they doubled down on the missed OPI in Clemson/Alabama in football part 2).
Yes, they do promote women much faster than men to work women's games. This is what happens when you don't run a pure merit system (although there's a ton of politics related to all those reffing moves, see how Higgins still can get to a FF on the men's side or Dee gets women's FFs). I'm not sure about other parts of the country, but in CT a lot of the college refs are on HS boards. So the training can be coming from there. And there's different rules at each level, hell even the men's and women's games don't have the same rules at the college level.
There's a lot wrong.
I reffed an AAU tournament this weekend. My partner was a 28 year college ref who did women's games at the D3 level. He was talking to his friend (another college ref) who said that the refs know that things like the euro step are a travel, but it is ignored because the players move too fast and it's just not worth the hassle of it being called inconsistently. So college refs really are just calling the obvious travels that everyone in the building sees and ignoring the more subtle ones (another challenge here is trying to ignore some fouls that then create a travel, so you miss 2 calls at once...something they tried to point out in the game last night when McCown traveled, but only after she got bumped). There are a lot of moving pieces here. They do have tryouts for college refs, and i'm not sure how those are done, but unless they're done by an independent audit, there will be agendas and biases involved.
