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Referees take heat for loose games in recent NCAA action

February was not a great month for referees in men's Division I basketball. Earlier this week, Hank Nichols told them so.

Nichols is the national coordinator of basketball officials for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. After watching about three weeks of rough post play, coaches roaming out of the coaching box and players going over the back to get rebounds, he fired off a bulletin to his referees.

"I kind of got after them and said that they've slipped in what we were supposed to be doing and what they've done all year," Nichols said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "They were going well and now they're not, and we need to step it up these last couple of weeks so we can get back on track."

Nichols said his bulletin was not related to the John Chaney incident, in which Chaney sent in a little-used Temple player to commit hard fouls. But his strongly worded memo addressed an atmosphere of a loosely regulated physical play that has crept into the college game and has in fact been forming for the past few seasons.

The college game has become rougher, and the officials aren't doing anything about it. For all of the focus on Chaney -- and he deserves every bit of it -- there is an overriding problem that must be addressed before the vigilantism he practiced becomes a way of life in the college game.

"The officials today are letting too much go," Jim Boeheim, the coach at Syracuse, said in a telephone interview. Boeheim led Syracuse to the national championship two seasons ago and won his 700th game last week. "I had a pro general manager come to our game and said our game is more physical than the NBA," he said. "That's not right. These are kids."

The Big East used to be the worst conference when it came to unbridled physical play. One season, the league even experimented with the NBA allotment of six fouls a player.

Boeheim said the Big East tried to shed its image of physical play for a while.

"Now we're getting back in it," he said. "I think it's a big mistake. The beauty of basketball is seeing guys play and move and run and not have people holding and grabbing."

Scoring has dipped in Division I men's basketball since 2000-2001, when teams averaged 71.4 points a game. The current average is 69.7 points.

The more telling statistic is the decline in the number of fouls called in the past five seasons.

In 2000-2001, referees called an average of 19.9 fouls per team per game. The figure has decreased with each successive season: 19.2 in 2001-2002; 19.1 in 2002-2003; 19.0 in 2003-2004. At the midpoint of this season, the figure was 18.6 fouls per team per game.

That's a significant drop: Nearly three fouls a game that were called four seasons ago are not being called.

About five years ago Nichols initiated an effort to take excessive physical play out of the college game, and more fouls were called. But in recent seasons, the trend has gradually moved back to fewer fouls being called.

"I thought that four years ago the game was rough and getting ready to get out of hand," Nichols said. "Almost everybody in basketball was concerned that the game had gotten to a point where the weight room outweighed the skills.

"Frankly, I was surprised that the numbers supported Boeheim's sense that the game had become more Neanderthal. Referees like to call fouls; they are law-and-order people .... Why would they let the rough stuff go, particularly when they could have a Chaney Thing on their hands?"
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