The complaints came in three waves over roughly six hours, first from Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire, then San Jose State coach Ken Niumatalolo and, finally, from Utah athletic director Mark Harlan.
They took turns blasting the officiating crews in a condensed sequence of public frustration unlike anything we have witnessed this season.
And we have witnessed a lot of frustration with officiating this season.
There is no database to track complaints by coaches and athletic directors. The NCAA has a clearinghouse for player eligibility, not officiating incompetence.
But in this season of expansion, with bigger conferences and a larger playoff field, the airing of grievances over calls seems to have ballooned.
Week 11 took the situation to the next level:
— McGuire smacked the Big 12 officials over a roughing-the-passer penalty on the Red Raiders that helped Colorado to victory.
“It’s 17-13, it’s third-and-seven and we bring pressure and it’s an incomplete pass,” McGuire said in his postgame news conference. “When you watch that play, somebody tell me how you can call roughing the passer.”
(McGuire was right: It was a terrible penalty. Even Dean Blandino, the Fox rules analyst, took issue with the call.)
— Niumatalolo was so incensed that he used his postgame interview on The CW — after a victory, no less — to slice and dice the Pac-12 officials who worked the Spartans’ game at Oregon State.
“I’ll just say this because we’re not in their conference: That was the worst officiating I’ve seen,” Niumatalolo said in response to a question about his team’s defense. “They were trying to cheat us … We’re not in their conference. I’m going to speak my mind and speak the truth.”
— Hours later, Harlan walked into a postgame news conference for players and coaches, proclaimed the officials had “stolen” the Holy War from Utah and questioned the crew’s professionalism after a controversial defensive holding penalty in the final 90 seconds.
Harlan did not suggest that he believed the officials were protecting Brigham Young, the only undefeated team in the Big 12. But that was a reasonable conclusion to draw, according to Rick Neuheisel, the CBS Sports analyst and former head coach in the Pac-12 and Big 12.
“BYU’s still the undefeated team,” Neuheisel said on ‘Canzano and Wilner: The Podcast.’ “You get a call like that … whether it’s the field judge or the side judge, throws the flag and bails them out with a holding call.
“You have to really want to call that. You have to really want to.
“I’m not calling anybody’s integrity into question. What I’m saying is, you can’t have Big 12 officials doing that because Big 12 officials are trying to protect the Big 12 league. It’s creating a conflict.”
That potential conflict isn’t reserved for the Big 12. The ACC experienced a similar situation early in the season when officials overturned a Hail Mary touchdown by Virginia Tech against Miami without the indisputable video evidence purportedly required. As a result, the Hurricanes remained undefeated.
There’s too much on the line for the conferences to leave room for appearances of favoritism or conflicts of interest. And because of the expanded, 12-team College Football Playoff, more games have something momentous at stake across more weeks of the season, thereby elevating emotions and placing greater demand on officials.
As McGuire said after Texas Tech’s loss to Colorado: “We have to be better, I guarantee you (CU coach Deion Sanders) is going to say he has to be better, but the officiating has to be better at this level.”
A blown call that would have eliminated a team from contention for the Belk Bowl doesn’t quite have the same significance as a mistake that derails a team’s pursuit of its conference title — and possible berth in the remodeled playoff.
“What we need to go forward here … is we need a one-house, all-united officiating group run by the CFP,” Neuheisel said. “There’s plenty of money to handle it.”
Egregious mistakes have infected every major conference and provide a rude welcome for fans of the former Pac-12 schools who mistakenly assumed they had left bad officiating behind when the conference collapsed.
That became evident in Week 1, when a Big Ten officiating crew missed an illegal substitution by Weber State that directly resulted in an injury to Washington tight end Quentin Moore. So bad was the gaffe that the conference later publicly acknowledged the error.
“Something like that has maybe happened over the years once or twice,” UW coach Jedd Fisch said. “No real reaction. Disappointed that it happened but we’ve got to move on.”
Anyone remember USC coach Lincoln Riley blowing a gasket during the 2022 season when Pac-12 officials mismanaged the clock at the end of the first half in Arizona? (They allowed the clock to run before the ball was set.)
Welp, the Trojans were on the wrong end of a perplexing call by Big Ten officials earlier this season — and it cost USC the game.
After initially ruling that the Trojans had stopped Minnesota’s quarterback sneak from the 1 yardline with 56 seconds remaining in a tie game, the officials reversed their call. And according to Riley, the Big Ten admitted later that it did not have the indisputable evidence needed to justify the overturn.
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(Yes, numerous former Pac-12 officials are working for new conferences, but they have not been responsible for many of the egregious mistakes thus far. The USC-Minnesota game, for example, was handled by a veteran Big Ten crew.)
The SEC hasn’t been immune from controversy. In fact, it produced the most controversial sequence of the season when officials changed a pass interference penalty while the Texas-Georgia game was delayed by fans throwing water bottles on the field.
The change prompted Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart to blast the officials — “They tried to rob us with calls” — and issue a warning in his postgame news conference.
“We’ve set a precedent that if you throw a bunch stuff on field and endanger athletes that you’ve got a chance to get your call reversed,” Smart said. “And that’s unfortunate. To me, that’s dangerous.”
Allowing individual conferences to oversee officiating is a different form of danger — one that could undermine the integrity of the game with more at stake than ever before.
In Neuheisel’s vision, college football would establish a centralized command operation to handle instant replay and snuff out any appearances of conflict.
“All these replays (would) go back to a mission control, much like they do in the NFL,” he said, “so you aren’t sitting there saying, ‘This is an ACC crew making an ACC-beneficial call. ‘This is a Big 12 crew making a Big 12-beneficial call.’
“We can’t have that. The game’s too good.”
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