It's happened to all of us at some point. Whether you are a Husky, Cougar, Ute, or Golden Bear, you surely have tuned into ESPN late on a Saturday night to watch your favorite football team play a conference rival. The time closes in on half-past-ten. You know deep down inside that absolutely no one is watching on the East Coast, but that's a rant for another day. Time is slowly waining in the fourth quarter of this close game, and that's when disaster strikes.
Your team is trying to piece together a late drive to take a lead and possibly sneak out with a win. With the game on the line on fourth down, your quarterback finds a diving receiver, good enough for a first down. But does he?
That's when the referees jump in. The head ref slides a headset over his white cap, while millions of fans look on at the slo-mo broadcast replays. The same thought goes through practically everyone's head: "I'm not sure whether that's a catch, but there certainly isn't evidence to overturn." You feel good about your chances on the review, but just as the referee returns to the field to announce the call, you remember; your team plays in the Pac-12.
"After further review, the ruling is the ball hit the ground..."
The referee is immediately drowned out by the fans and students of a team that truly stole a game from your grasp. Welcome to the life of a Pac-12 football fan.
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If it wasn't apparent already, that little narrative was a flashback to the 2013 Stanford - UW game, where the Huskies' drive to try to move to 5-0 on the season was shut down at the hands of the Pac-12 refs. Some people feel that the officials shouldn't be the only ones to blame, and they are right. The Huskies did, after all, put themselves in a scenario where they needed to come back because they didn't convert on earlier opportunities. The problem is, this was nowhere near an isolated issue.
Week after week, the outcome of Pac-12 games are being affected by the bogus calls of the conference-employed zebras. Every week there seems to be a new, creative way to cheat a poor, helpless Pac-12 team. Whether it's a ridiculous OPI penalty for a phantom push-off, or a referee refusing to spot the ball while the final seconds tick off the clock, teams are losing games because of these decisive calls. With it happening in almost every game at this point, it's time to say enough.
There needs to be something done about this. You can't crown the champion of power-five conference without being able to keep a straight face because so many games are changed by these game-altering calls. Honestly, as a fan I couldn't care less what is done about it as long as it does get fixed. There's several things that could be done about it. Maybe you need better training, or harder discipline for completely absurd calls. Maybe you need new refs all together. I don't know. What I do know is that if every other major conference in college football is able to make sure their officials are competent, there's absolutely no reason the Pac-12 should be unable to do the same thing.
It's definitely fair to say that these referees are in a bad situation. I get that. But at a certain point there becomes a limit to how much of this insanity you can allow. Do you think the coaches and players that work their tails off for months are in a good situation when they are losing games critical to their seasons because they are stripped away? In the end, even though it's a bad situation for the referees, it's also not a good situation for anyone else. If players and coaches are being held accountable for failure within their football programs, why can't referees be held accountable for failure within their officiating? Until this can happen, the Pac-12 cannot be fully taken seriously by the rest of college football, and it won't be able to reach it's full potential as a conference.