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Message: [QUOTE="JoePgh, post: 4255862, member: 1131"] This is worth listening to. As is often the case, I agreed with part of what Megan Culmo said and disagreed strongly with another claim of hers. First, the disagreement: She criticized the officiating, saying that the officials called too many fouls and took the game away from the players. Definitely the officials called the game tightly, but I suspect that the supervisor of officiating who assigned them to the game warned them of the history of UCF-UConn games in the AAC, and told them that their first priority was to keep control of the game and prevent it from degenerating into a basketball version of the "Slap Shot" movie. That is why they called all the fouls, tightly on both teams. After the incident where Paige and the UCF player wouldn't let go of the held ball, they warned both teams that any repetition of that would lead to technical fouls being called (per the announcers). And when Paige got knocked to the floor by a UCF player in the third quarter, they spent several minutes reviewing the video before deciding (correctly, in my opinion) that it was only a common foul. After the players on both teams noticed how tightly the fouls were being called, they decided that "selling" calls by flopping might work -- and it did. (Yes, UConn players did it too.) But the refs were determined to maintain control of the game, even if they went for a few flops. I think that was a justifiable decision from their perspective. Now, as to Megan's other comment that I agree with: She praised Azzi in particular for maintaining her composure in the game, especially in handling the ball against the UCF pressure. Despite comments on the Boneyard to the commentary, I thought that all of the UConn guards who played in the second half did a very good (not perfect) job of maintaining custody of the ball against a very high level of pressure by UCF. UCF had only 4 steals in the entire game, and the turnover margin was 13-to-20 in UConn's favor. I will bet that is far better than most teams do against UCF's defense. [/QUOTE]

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