No-calls "killing" ACC, analysis shows

Seated beside Mike Krzyzewski at last year’s ACC spring meetings, a coach provocatively praised John Clougherty, the league coordinator of men’s basketball officials, for reducing game assignments for certain referees at Cameron Indoor Stadium. At last week’s annual meetings, it was a coach urging his peers to write on napkins the names of the ACC officials they least wanted to see working their games.

Boys will be boys. Or, rather, coaches will be coaches.

Fortunately, Clougherty doesn’t put officiating assignments up to a vote by coaches, fans, or anyone else. As for blackballing, or a scratch list, as it is also called, that went out with the Edsel. (Not to be confused with longtime referee Duke Edsell, seen now and again still working ACC contests.)

Clougherty knows that emotion clouds vision when those with a rooting interest discuss officiating. Coaches pelt his office during the season with select video clips seeking to prove a point. (See, Tyler Hansbrough shuffles his feet!)

Almost inevitably, someone will heatedly proclaim that ACC officiating is the worst it’s ever been.

Yet evidence supports a different view.

This past season, 32 of 60 men on the ACC officiating roster worked NCAA tournament games. That’s one of every three refs the NCAA selected. Such assignments presumably reflect a measure of respect for their work, and an implicitly favorable comparison with counterparts around the country.

An ACC presence was especially notable in the three games of the Final Four, when the action is most closely scrutinized. “We really were well represented,” said Clougherty, supervisor of ACC officials since the 2005-06 season. “We had seven out of the nine (officials), and also had the stand-by.”

Quality control during regular season contests, instituted by Fred Barakat, Clougherty’s predecessor, has undoubtedly improved ACC officiating. Observers assigned to games chart officials’ calls, share key observations with the game crew at halftime, and file a post-game report with the officiating coordinator. Every call or significant play is scrutinized, and officials receive regular critiques of their work.

Now, to his credit, Clougherty has taken a further step to improve the quality of ACC officiating, one he believes is unique in college basketball.

The former game officials decided to test the common assertion that college officials get calls right 90 percent of the time. “That’s easy to say,” Clougherty offered. “I said, ‘You know what, I don’t know how accurate that is.’” So the conference hired four men who previously officiated in the NBA and ACC – Reggie Cofer, Nolan Fine, Rusty Herring, and Donnie Vaden -- and had them review DVD’s of all 89 conference games televised last season.

Clougherty called it a “deep dive,” and said the evaluators “graded every whistle out.” And while any evaluation is ultimately tainted to some degree by subjectivity, coaches reacted positively to the effort, and the results.

“We think it’s excellent,” Wake Forest head coach Dino Gaudio said.

“Officiating is not perfect, it’s always going to be imperfect,” said Boston College coach Al Skinner. “If a guy’s going to take time to learn what to improve, that’s great.” Clougherty already has briefed several ACC officials on areas of weakness revealed by the video review.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the evaluators found that errors of omission were more problematic than violations that were called.

“The no-calls are killing us,” Clougherty said. “When the official blows his whistle, he’s usually right. The percentage comes down considerably, from the low 90’s to the mid-80’s, when they should have had a whistle, but they didn’t.”

The most glaring no-calls involved what Clougherty called “body bumping” initiated by defenders. Offensive players attempting to drive to the basket are frequently “body checked,” he said, and penalized because no foul is assessed.

The ACC won’t be alone in looking for such contact in 2008-09. Among next season’s announced points of emphasis from the NCAA men’s basketball rules committee is “contact on the ball handler/dribbler and by the ball/handler dribbler,” a concern “due to its importance as it relates to freedom of movement which in turn affects offensive play and scoring.”

ACC coaches did request several more sophisticated levels of video analysis for next year, steps Gaudio thinks “will probably dispel most of the prejudices.”

They want to see how calls break down in terms of benefit to the home team compared to the visitor. This is not a concern unique to the ACC; during the current NBA playoffs, one reason commonly cited, however unfairly, for the dominance of teams playing on their home courts is crowd influence on the officials.

ACC coaches also want to know how often incorrect calls favor -- or plague – each member of the conference. Complaints that visitors to the Triangle’s ACC schools routinely get hosed are as old as the league. Calls of “Carolina ref!” are almost as venerable, rivaled more recently by insistence Duke gets too many breaks.

Clougherty is amenable to satisfying the coaches’ curiosity. “Will we do all of that at one time? Possibly,” he said.

One can only imagine (and perhaps savor) the discussions these findings would provoke among fans and media, who harbor plenty of suspicions about favoritism in officiating.

Asked if grading of calls will be shared with the public, Clougherty began laughing before the question was fully uttered. “You knew that answer before you asked it,” he said. “We’re not letting that out.”