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Message: [QUOTE="Bigpetunia, post: 3843173, member: 1772"] Whether our favorite team loses, or, as on Monday, wins a tight game, one inevitable and unrelentingly tiresome consequence of such an event will be the emergence of the usual chorus of complaint about all of the “blown” calls delivered by the referees. It’s as though all the missed open shots, the defensive lapses, the rebounding woes, and the mental mistakes cease to matter…”the damn refs cost us the game,” or, “we woulda won by more except for the refs!” With Notre Dame fans in mind, I have long labeled this exercise as the ultimate losers’ lament, though, as our Board suggests, we UConn fans are far from immune to this practice ourselves. It’s not that egregious calls do not exist, as they did on Monday, nor that they have no impact on any given game’s outcome…they do, of course. It’s not that there aren’t more skilled and less skilled practitioners of the art…there certainly are! But all the whining misses the point entirely. Skilled or not, referees are an essential element of the game. Games cannot be contested without them. They are, alas, human, and inevitably flawed. In every sport, but especially in basketball, and especially in “physical” games, most every call they make is highly subjective, so that one’s assessment of their relative correctness is mainly a function of for which team one happens to be rooting. The essential point then is that refereeing, both good and bad, has to be accepted by fans as simply part of the game – a part without which we cannot do so long as games exist. I’m sure there are times when individual refs are guilty of going beyond making horrible calls, when they, alas, place their thumb on the scale, one way or another. None of us know how often this happens, but my guess is that such instances are rare. They simply make demonstrably terrible calls without bias. Modern technology employed by certain sports successfully helps cut down on, but far from eliminates, such instances, but there’s no way for this to be applied to basketball…is it a charge or a blocking foul? Instant replay ain’t gonna help. The refs, who we know are flawed going in, will be the sole arbiters…just part of the game we must accept. Whining about it is hopelessly pointless. Better to focus on all the other factors that go into a win or a loss! [/QUOTE]

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