To most of America, it sure as hell looked like the Wisconsin Badgers got hosed by a blown out-of-bounds call in the final minutes of last night’s championship game. It was hard to imagine how the referees could have looked at the same replay angle that we all saw at home during their review and still awarded possession to Duke. Thanks to John Adams, the NCAA’s head of basketball officiating, we now know exactly how that call got blown: the referees never saw replay angle we did.
Adams was a guest on Sirius XM’s college sports show today, and he was surprisingly candid when talking about the blown call:
Adams was as clear as day: “We never saw, on our monitor, what everybody saw at home, if you can believe that... I saw it after they had left the monitor, and actually thought about, is it in my prerogative to get up, run over to the table, buzz the buzzer, and tell them to come back and look?”
Adams isn’t really clear on exactly why the officials on the floor never got to see the best angle of the play, but the implication seems to be that the blame lies with the video review system that the NCAA invested in this year. “We have been told time and time again, ‘Nobody at home will see anything you didn’t see,’ and I will tell you that is not what happened last night.”