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Message: [QUOTE="JoePgh, post: 2046732, member: 1131"] One way in which The Boneyard is no different from any other fan board is that posters here see incompetent refereeing whenever any close call or non-call goes against UConn. On other boards, they do exactly the same thing when the call or non-call goes against their team. Thankfully, most posters here and elsewhere acknowledge that bad calls almost never affect the outcome of the game, and are rarely systematically in favor of either team. I wonder if most fans understand how difficult the referee's job is. The difficulty arises mainly from the fact that they have to make an instant decision, in far less than a second, as to whether they will blow their whistle, and if so, what they will call. In my daily work on my job, I don't believe I ever have to make a critical decision in a fraction of a second, much less a few dozen in the course of two hours. To do that game-in and game-out with an accuracy rate of even 80% would require Gabby-like reflexes and instant cognition, and I am not sure that is granted to very many mortal individuals. The most demanding call is the charge/block situation near the basket. Because of the rules surrounding the "restricted area", the referee has to process: (a) were the defender's feet set? (b) was the offensive player into her shooting motion when the defender's feet became set? (c) did the defender lean or contort her body to move her position without moving her feet? (d) Were any part of the defender's feet inside the restricted area? and (e) was the defender the primary defender or a help defender (since the primary defender is allowed to earn a charge in the restricted area)? Could you process all of that in a quarter of a second? Traveling is another example. At Monday night's game, there were several plays where Gabby caught a pass in traffic and was immediately called for traveling. The crowd reacted very negatively to those calls, but on replay they looked justifiable to me. But I'll be honest -- I don't see (in real time) 70 to 80% of the traveling calls that are made. On slow-motion replay, most of them turn out to be correct. That also requires a quarter-second decision by the referee as to whether the ball was or was not out of the player's hands when she moved her pivot foot. The other point that I would make about this is that fan complaints about refereeing are constant across all sports and at all levels. Do you think that MCBB draws fewer complaints about the reffing? Guess again. The NBA? The NHL? The NFL? Fans always think that their team's latest loss can be attributed to a bad call by a ref who is either blind or who consciously favors the other team. Give it a rest. P. S. In the next 10 years, I wonder if many refereeing decisions can be automated, so that a computer processing a video image of the action could make the call or at least the review. I think the technology is sufficiently advanced today that balls and strikes in baseball (including whether the batter checked his swing) could be automated, and it would probably improve the accuracy of those calls if that were done. I don't think it can be done today for basketball, but that is hopefully coming in 5 to 10 years. [/QUOTE]

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