Let me know what you think at theplaycaller@gmail.com .
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I’ve been thinking for nearly two weeks now about what light I could shed on “The Travel” that would make Duke fans feel better, or at least less confused, while being fair to the officiating crew in Duke’s game at Wake Forest. I looked at replays by the twenties and studied rules I’d read a hundred times, hoping that something useful would present itself. And the hours of video review, rules study, and wandering thought did finally pay off, though I’m still trying to work out exactly how. Where, after all, is the pay-off to a Duke fan in knowing to an absolute certainty that a travel was committed in the last three seconds of that game?

Does it lie in bringing myself and potentially others to a more thorough understanding of an obscure clause in the rulebook? Is it in being able to get over the pain of a tough loss more easily by concluding that Wake did indeed ‘deserve’ the victory, whatever that even means? Is it in thinking that Gerald Henderson might be able to forget about the ending more easily if he knew the truth, that he didn’t get screwed on the travel call? It’s in none of those things. Because the travel I’m referring to wasn’t committed by Gerald Henderson; it was committed by James Johnson on the game-winning lay-up.

Those who didn’t delete the game after their own frustrating replay review will be able to see it clearly. When he took control of the inbounds pass from L. D. Williams, Johnson’s left foot was clearly—no slow-motion required—on the ground. Without dribbling he then elevated for a jump-stop into the lane before going up for the lay-in. For those keeping score we have a pivot foot established (never a dribble), the pivot foot going up, and the pivot foot coming down before a pass or shot. By rule it’s a travel. (And if you try to rationalize Duke’s loss by arguing any of that to your ABD or Wake connections, you deserve all of the eye-rolls and laughter that come your way.)

If I have anything interesting at all to write about the call on Henderson it is only that everybody’s going to have to make peace with it, because 99 times out of 100, Duke or no Duke, that’s going to be a travel (and you’d never see the hundredth guy on television again). Though a reasonable, but not definitive case could be made that the call was technically incorrect, we’re howling at the moon in getting mad at the officials who called that play. Were those clamoring for a foul or a no-call on the Henderson travel just as upset when G wasn’t called for a run-over before his pass to Scheyer for the potential game-winner against Miami? Because Miami fans have as legitimate a gripe on that play as Duke fans did on the Wake travel.

If there’s much to be taken from discussing officiating and the Wake Forest end-game, it’s in trying to understand why nobody ever argued for a travel call on Johnson. Part of the explanation lies in the differences in how Duke fans watched the replays of the Henderson travel sequence and the Johnson lay-up. On the first play, most of us were watching specifically to better inform our judgments on the supposed travel itself. Few in blue were much worried about whether Mike Wood could or should have put Teague on the line for two shots following the bump he absorbed from Dave McClure on the drive. The microscopes were instead focused almost exclusively on Henderson’s feet and the grounded Teague.

For those who had the stomach to review the following play the mindset was completely different. By the time we saw any replays we all knew that Duke had suffered a huge defensive breakdown. For most Duke fans the only reason to even review that play was to try to understand exactly how Johnson came to receive and score the ball so easily. It’s no wonder, then, that in not looking for the travel on Johnson, most didn’t see it. This despite the facts that 1) lots of people watched that play lots of times, and 2) if one had been focusing intently on Johnson’s feet, the travel was much more easily discernible than many that are called from the stands and living rooms on Tyler Hansbrough. So here we have a play that by rule did constitute a clear, but not obvious violation. Even if it won’t do much to salve the wound from Winston-Salem, a better grasp of the differences between those two words can help us with something else: resolving some of the collective angst regarding Tyler and the Refs.

It’s an immutable fact that when critiquing officials or playing out what-if scenarios, fans will start by cherry-picking the plays that support their arguments while forgetting or ignoring the more inconvenient truths. As the Johnson play is meant to illustrate, for the officials making decisions in real time, not every clear play is obvious. A fan instinctively clamors for the benefit of every call that is clear, without concern for whether it should have been obvious to an official. It should go without saying, however, that such a standard is impossible for referees to meet. What officials strive for–and the only reasonable thing fans can hope for—is adherence to the referee’s number one rule: call the obvious.

It’s easy for fans to use wide angles and replays to discern what is clear, but consider the challenges officials face in calling Hansbrough’s obvious. First, he’s a post player. Post players are generally involved in more potential fouls than perimeter players, since they tend to operate in more congested spaces. Another initial challenge with Hansbrough is his unorthodox style of movement. If the goal is to get rebounds and score points there’s no problem with not being smooth. But for officials, trying to referee the un-smooth is a pain.

If a high-level official knows where the offensive guy is going to end up, 95%+ play-calling accuracy is a virtual lock; but that percentage drops precipitously when officials are simply reacting rather than anticipating. And if the officials with wider angles to see the rest of the floor are unsure of what’s coming next, how about the defender trying to match Hansbrough by himself? He’s probably guessing, too. This situation, in which an official who didn’t anticipate well is trying to judge a defender who’s trying to play catch-up in the paint, is a sure-fire recipe for controversy, since it often ends with none of the officials having a great look at the entire play.

In addition to his game being tough to anticipate, Hansbrough makes the officials’ jobs more difficult still by rarely giving them benefit of a free missed guess. For example, Hakeem Olajuwon was an amazingly quick post presence whose movements were often difficult to predict. He made things really tough on referees, sometimes making them look downright silly. But in addition to fooling lots of officials, Hakeem would often fool his defender so badly that the play would develop in a way that was completely obvious, whether that meant a clumsy foul or an uncontested dunk or fade-away. An official can be badly out of position and still correctly judge an off-balance stiff trying to stop a gracefully spinning Dream. But it’s rarely that easy with Hansbrough, who by virtue of his lack of quickness and nose for contact tends to punish everyone who guesses wrong.

These factors alone are sufficient to predict that Hansbrough would require more murky decisions from officials than would an average player. What makes Hansbrough more controversial still is that there are two other variables at work that serve to strengthen—or exacerbate, depending on your perspective—the overall trend. The first is the number of touches he receives in scoring position relative to offensive possessions played, also known as the anti-McClure effect. The other is his team’s average number offensive possessions: according to Ken Pomeroy’s latest update UNC is second in the nation in unadjusted offensive possessions per game.

The simple math thus dictates that even if officials judged Hansbrough’s plays with the same accuracy rate that they judge everyone else, Hansbrough would still be the beneficiary, AND THE VICTIM, of more missed calls than anyone else on the floor. As human beings second and partisan fans first, our brains aren’t predisposed to index for the rates here. It won’t matter to most Duke fans that the Blue Devils may have only rarely challenged Hansbrough to play tough post defense; it will only matter that Zoubek and Thomas got dinged incorrectly a couple of times when they themselves were trying to defend Hans.

So what’s the argument here? I haven’t done the kind of intensive video review necessary to claim that Hansbrough’s plays are (or aren’t) judged as accurately on average as those of most other players. What is clear to me, though, is that if the proper discounting is done for his position, his unorthodox game, his status as focal point of the offense, and UNC’s high number of possessions per game, the officials do a much better job of refereeing Hansbrough than lots of fans and media members give them credit for. It follows, then, that if you think Hansbrough gets more breaks than he should, you basically have two theories on which to hang your hat: 1) Difficult tasks will generally be executed with less precision than simple ones, or 2) The refs are in the tank for Tyler. And if you choose the latter, may you be shown no mercy by your friends who’ve been saying the same thing about Duke for the last decade.

I’ll save discussion of Tyler’s travel adventures for the return trip to Chapel Hill.

The Playcaller welcomes your questions and comments at theplaycaller@gmail.com .

Look, if Monroe didn’t say anything, then it was a big-time mistake by the official. There’s no getting around it. He should have been more than sure it was Monroe before pointing the finger at him.

But there’s another issue here that Georgetown fans are going to be loathe to bring up in public. Those seats behind the visiting bench are premium, tightly held tickets. The people who occupy those seats are given their tickets by players, coaches, and VVIPs. In other words, it’s a great privilege to sit in those seats, and that privilege should carry with it expectations of a certain level of decorum. And it is ultimately the responsibility of the head coach to make it clear to everyone distributing those tickets that during the game, the fans in those seats should comport themselves as if they were actually on the team.

Georgetown supporters can complain about the injustice of the whole thing; and again, if Monroe didn’t say anything, then it’s worse than a raw deal. But let’s not let the Georgetown coaching staff off the hook completely.

Also, here’s one I wrote during the Olympics but didn’t post here.

It would be really easy to sentimentalize my dad right now, probably easier than for most sons or daughters.  Because my dad is sick.  Not death-bed sick, not even you’re-regressing-rapidly sick, but sick nevertheless.  So I could slip effortlessly into feelings of pity:  pity for him; pity for his dedicated wife, the mother of his two sons; and most easily of all, pity for us sons ( it’s a twisted feature of this pattern that those most deserving of our attention—though they may be first in line—often get it the least).  So I’m going to resist.  I’m not going to allow my father’s life to be framed by his illness.  There are lots of good reasons to reject the easy way of seeing and remembering, but I only need one:   he has lived an exemplary life, and there’s something cheap about using his physical condition as a pretext for drawing attention to it.  So, except insofar as I’ve already broken my own rule, I’m not going to engage in any of that nonsense.

Partly because teaching as an enterprise is so horribly broken in the West, I didn’t grow up thinking of my dad as a teacher at all, much less a great one. For me, teachers were the people who showed up daily for nine months a year to actively, intentionally tell you things you needed to remember.  Here’s the problem, here are the rules to apply, and here’s how you use the rules to arrive at a solution.  That just wasn’t Daddy.  He rarely advertised what the problems were, and he was never didactic in listing the rules to apply.  He was just Daddy.  And being Daddy, as it turns out, was what made him such a great teacher, what helped equip me with the tools I needed to solve real problems. 

I remember very few classic father-son talks with my dad.  We talked a lot, and I’m sure we had our fair share of serious sit-downs.   But I don’t remember having any signal moments of enlightenment or growth in any of those talks.  But instead of processing that amnesia as evidence of a lack of fatherly wisdom, I see it as the complete opposite.  If I had to name one virtue that my father’s life has embodied it would be constancy.  Whether he was consciously thinking about it or not, my dad always seemed to recognize  that being a good father was far more about doing the right things at the right times than it was about always having the perfect speech ready during times of tumult. 

I don’t think I’ve ever started a sentence with “My dad always taught me…”   I think that’s telling.  When we use that type of language we are signaling that we perceive a particular period of learning as a series of discrete happenings.  But to remember in this way is to invite questions of what was going on the rest of the time.  My whole life with my dad has been the rest of the time.  Though I think my father far more perfect than imperfect, his perfections, such as they may be, do not define him. His life is defined instead by, well, his life.  His has been and is one of faithful discipleship; one marked by service and sacrifice to God, exemplified by his works in his various congregations and with his friends and family (part of the moral genius of his life has been, again, the continuity across these categories).  It is through his countless commitments and acts of love and sacrifice that I see my father and how and what he has taught me.

Ours is a society that likes to categorize.  Maybe we think it simplifies things to think of our various roles in life as discrete, whether as parent, spouse, or professional.  I think this way of thinking usually ends up causing more problems than it solves.  What, exactly, do we accomplish when we talk of what’s appropriate at work versus at home?  With friends rather than enemies?  I suspect it’s largely to allow us to justify the otherwise unjustifiable.  Though it has at times caused his family great frustration, my dad never much bought into the idea of putting on different hats in different places.  Whether as a pastor, a husband, a father, son, or businessman, he’s always sought to conduct himself with the same kindness, grace and humility.  Except that he hasn’t really sought anything; it’s just what came naturally to him.

Though I stand by the idea that my dad is a great father not because of individual acts of greatness but because of a life well- and steadily lived, there is one story that I do think perfectly exemplifies his quiet, powerful methods of teaching.  When I was nine I took a tumble during a basketball game, a fall unfortunately broken by the head of one of my opponents.  Though he wasn’t seriously injured he came up with a nasty cut on his head, and upon seeing his own blood tore out of the gym with a scream that I can still hear.  Before the boy’s parents could leave the gym my dad must have asked them where they were taking him for stitches, because shortly after the game my dad went to the hospital to check on him.

It would have been really easy for Daddy to have used that as an opportunity to teach me some big life lesson, to require me to go with him and issue some sort of an apology.  I actually can’t remember whether he asked me to go with him (I’m sure he offered), but if he did I resisted, and he didn’t force me.  That’s who he is.  He wasn’t making that trip because he felt guilty about his son being the proximate cause of a injury (though he doubtless had those feelings).  Nor did he go to the ER that day in some unctuous display of righteousness.  He was demonstrating to me—though my nine-year-old eyes couldn’t see it yet—that grace isn’t grace if it’s not freely given, and that compelled sympathy or apology is neither.   In thinking about that event I’ve wondered whether Daddy had all of that stuff figured out ahead of time, knowing that I would learn more that way than any other.  But it occurs to me now how silly such a question is, for he wouldn’t be who he is if he’d acted based on any sort of a calculation.

I’ve been guilty on plenty of occasions of getting schmaltzy on Days like this one.  And while that can be temporarily uplifting, it’s a high that fades, often until about a year later when the next edition of the Day rolls around.   I’ve long recognized that brand of silliness when it comes to Valentine’s Day, and I finally see it in the whole lot.  But that doesn’t mean I’m done with them, only that I now recognize the pitfalls; the pitfalls of taking people for granted for huge stretches on the calendar and then ginning up enough gooey goodness on the special Day that everyone forgives and forgets the previous stretch of forgetfulness.  So I’m treating this Father’s Day as a wake-up call for myself. 

And to that end, my loving father,  I honor you not only on this your official Day of Recognition, but for every one of your days past, present and future.  I love you, JG.

So in an effort to reclaim some of my brain and those of a handful of others, I’m going to try something new and apply some analytical rigor to the ramblings of some of ESPN’s talking heads.   A hat tip to the brilliant writers at firejoemorgan.com, whose concept I have baldly stolen.  I hope they’ll forgive me, and if they won’t forgive me, I just hope they don’t think I’m a crap writer.

Today’s post will focus on the latest episode of The Sports Reporters, hosted by John Saunders.  In today’s show we were blessed to have Mike Lupica dragging down the usually solid Bob Ryan and Mitch Albom.  All three are accomplished reporters/columnists, but this is teevee, so it’s different.

Here’s the news on the first segment of today’s episode.

Saunders:  (Intrduction)…Gentlemen, after twenty-six straight wins, Memphis has lost, 66-62 to Tennessee.  The Volunteers are now number one.  Now, do you think we saw this year’s national champion in the FedEx Forum last night?

There are probably six or eight teams that have a legitimate chance to win the national championship.  Given the single-elimination format, the best team very often doesn’t win the tournament.  So the chances that one could pick the winner of the tournament from two teams are, from a probability standpoint, dubious at best.  But the game was last night, there was some drama, so I guess it’s a reasonable jumping-off point for the program.  Let’s see what happens.

Albom:  Possibly one of them, but I don’t think Memphis is going to get there shooting eight for seventeen free throws; you can’t win close games if you can’t put the ball in on the easiest shot on the floor.

 I’m not sure free throws are easier than lay-ups, but Memphis’s free-throw shooting is a definite weakness.  Nice start by our friend form the Detroit Free-Press. 

Lupica:  Listen, I still think Memphis is the best team, but I think they let a lot of other contenders into the tent last night, thinking that they’re going to be the last team standing.

Aaand we’re off.  I’m not sure how Albom managed to get in the first word here, but I’m glad Mike didn’t wait any longer than he did before asserting his authority.  Already he’s creating more questions than he’s answering, and with only one sentence.

1.  Why did you ever think Memphis was the best team?  UCLA, Kansas, and North Carolina (when healthy) all have comparable talent, are probably better coached, and are more battle-tested due to superior conference schedules.  But it’s still ultimately a subjective matter, so I can’t get too hung up on this one.

2.  Beyond the ambiguous pronoun usage, Lupica seems to be arguing that there were a lot of teams that didn’t think they had a chance last night until they saw Memphis lose.  Apparently he believes that none of these other potential contenders was aware that USC took Memphis to overtime, that the Tigers had beaten UTEP by only four points in Memphis, and that UAB blew a 7-pt lead to UM in the last 90 seconds of their game in Birmingham.

Ryan:  Very passionate, hard-fought game, but I didn’t see anybody that jumped out at me “WE’RE NUMBER ONE!” and I definitely think there are other teams in the mix for sure who felt very heartened by that outcome.

As usual, Ryan is much more coherent than Lupica, but he seems to have made Lupica’s mistake #2.  On the other hand, it’s possible that he’s thinking there are teams out there who were more worried about Tennessee than Memphis, and that the other contenders were encouraged by the fact that Tennessee is clearly beatable.  Logically this makes more sense, but given any lack of a previous reference directly to Tennessee, it’s tough to believe that the Vols were the team to whom Ryan was referring.

Albom:  There’s an upside and a downside for Memphis.  They’re facing a lot of abuse over “You’re not in a hard enough conference,” and I think they certainly redeemed themselves there.  They didn’t–all of a sudden when the pressure got really tough in a 1-2 game—disappear.  But there seems to be a reason why teams don’t finish perfect in college basketball:  it’s a really, really hard thing to do.  And I find it very interesting that the five times that in-state teams have played each other 1 versus 2, the visiting team has always won.  That speaks to the pressure of having to perform for your home fans when you’re eighteen and nineteen years old and trying to keep perfection up. 

My general theory of The Sports Reporters is that the more a panelist says, the more confused the audience becomes.  Albom certainly wasn’t in the mood to flout conventional wisdom here. 

A team from a weak conference beats a team from a worse conference, and that should change my feelings about the Memphis strength of schedule how, exactly?  Is it because Memphis managed not to get blown out?  Are we supposed to give the Tigers bonus points for “not disappearing?” 

Next, Mitch lets us know that going undefeated is really tough.  Check.  But is he trying to say more than this?  Is he arguing that the more you win, the tougher it is to go undefeated?  I hope not, because that’s sort of, uh, not correct. 

Albom closes with a triple axel-triple lutz combination in which he uses an almost entirely made-up statistic in order to draw a horrible inference.  The statistic he sites is that Tennessee-Memphis was the fifth one-versus-two match-up of two same-state teams, and that the visiting team had won every game.  From this ”fact” he concludes that the pressure to perform in front of the home fans was the cause of defeat.  Even if this stat squares perfectly with his averred causal relationship, he’d still have a lot of work left in order to demonstrate that his proposed cause was actually the cause.  But just for fun, let’s see if the stat even works in the first place. 

The first thing we need to know about the stat is how “one” and “two” matched up with “home” and “away” each game.  Because if the visitors were number one, well, you know the rest.  As it turns out, that level of digging wasn’t even necessary, because two of the five match-ups involved Cincinnati and Ohio State, in the NCAA Tournament, meaning there was no home or visiting team in any real sense.  And it only gets worse from there.  In 1994, Number one Duke lost at number two North Carolina, and the same thing happened again four years later when an Elton Brand-less Duke team was knocked off its perch in Chapel Hill. (None of these participants was even undefeated at the time of the match-up, so you figure out the “perfection” angle.)

 So to recap, great job by Albom of making bad use of a fake stat. That takes some doing.  

Lupica:  It lived up to its billing, this game.  This was a passionate, wonderful sports event.  You know, I think Memphis came in thinking that Tennessee was going to shoot all the threes, and then (Memphis) start hitting all the threes at the start.  And for everything that happened in the second half—and there was that point in the first five or six minutes of the second half where you thought the game was completely going to get away from Memphis—they did everything you’re supposed to do to win the game.  And they end up losing because Dozier short-armed a lay-up and two guys come down with the rebound (Lupica is referring her to the play in which two Memphis players struggled with each other for the rebound of Dozier’s shot, causing a traveling violation which gave Tennessee possession with about 40 seconds remaining) or they would basically have had the chance to hold the ball for 90 seconds out of the last two minutes of the game. 

Awesome.  I love it when Lupica channels Senator Uberbabble, Digger Phelps.   Five sentences, and nary a well-developed thought. Memphis did everything they needed to do to win the game?  Eight of seventeen from the stripe, outrebounded 47-31, Joey Dorsey gets one point and six rebounds.  Call me crazy, but I think their performance was lacking.  I think it’s a little fairer to attribute the loss to a combination of those factors than to a turnover following Dozier missing a contested, double-pump (assuredly not a lay-up).  And for the record, even if Memphis had come up with the rebound they’d have been fouled almost immediately, which would not exactly have entailed an end-of-the-world scenario for the Vols.

 Ryan:  One thing we saw from that game for sure was that the best player on the floor for sure was Derrick Rose.— 

This is Ryan at his best.  After listening to Lupica spew nonsense for thirty seconds, Ryan jumps in with, “All that stuff you just said?  You’re wrong about pretty much all of it.  Let’s talk about something we can actually say with some degree of certainty.” 

Lupica:  Oh, man.  Oh, man. 

Lupica’s inner monologue: “That’s the next thing I was going to say if Ryan hadn’t cut me off.” 

Ryan:  –and the more they can get the ball in his hands in crucial situations, the better off they’ll be.  And I think they’ll have to remember that next time; because he didn’t get the chance to make the plays in the very end. 

This is a textbook example of what I like to call the Lupica effect.  It occurs when Mike Lupica talks nonsensically for so long that the brains of otherwise sane people turn to mush.  The facts are that of the last seven times Memphis had the ball (including one possession that included two offensive rebounds and subsequent offensive resets), Rose either scored or had a penetrate-and-kick on five of those possessions.  One of the other two, Chris Douglas-Roberts penetrated and was fouled, and on the other, Rose gave up the ball early in the possession and never really worked to get the ball back.   

Lupica:  And Lofton had a bad game, and they still win the game! 

Huh.  Tennessee’s top scorer has a really sub-par game, forces numerous really bad shots in the second half, and Tennessee still manages to win the game…at Memphis.  But you still think Memphis is better.  Interesting.  

Ryan:  Lofton did not make a single jump shot, as I recall, and he forced shots badly, and he played poorly, basically, and they still won the game. 

What he said.  Way to get in and get out, Bob. 

Albom:  And (Lofton) made the free throws at the end.  But this could be one of those cases where actually both teams benefit, because obviously Tennessee now feels, “Hey, we’re capable of being number one,” and Memphis gets that thing off their back.  You know, I never liked that thing in college basketball, taking a perfect record into the (NCAA) tournament.  If all that really matters is the tournament, okay, now you know what it feels like to lose and you’ll see what it feels like to come back from that.  That could actually serve them well. 

So this debate’s not going away any year soon.  Do you want to go into the tournament undefeated or not?  If you’re going to say something here, it should be something new, or at least something accurate.  Did Albom do either here?  He says that the pressure’s off Memphis now that they’ve lost.  What’s always confused me, though, is how that matters once you get to the NCAA Tournament.  Once you get there, you know that if you lose, you go home.  That’s the case whether you’re 30-0 or 13-18.  Certainly there’s more early-round pressure on high seeds, but high seeds are supposed to win early-round games anyway, so what does it really matter?  

 As for Albom’s closing, whaaa?  How is knowing how to bounce back from a loss going to serve a team well in a lose-and-you’re-out tournament? 

Lupica:  You know what the interesting thing about the game is?  For all the firepower on the court last night—and there was a ton of talent and a ton of firepower—and sometimes the circumstances make you miss in basketball.  And they both(pause) played (pause) defense last night.  And Memphis should have gotten a stop on the basket that won the game for Tennessee.  They did everything they could, and the kid made the shot. 

I always love it when someone prefaces a remark by implying that there’s only one interesting thing about a game, player, election, etc. But I digress.   

Both teams played defense.  Memphis played good defense on Tennessee’s go-ahead possession.  Got it.   Really, with insight like that, I can’t believe James Dolan hasn’t hired this guy to run the Knicks.

Saunders:  I’ve never been quite sure I understand why people say this, but, is it possible that this is good for Memphis, to lose a game before the tournament? 

Classic.  Saunders is already so bored with the show that he’s unaware that Albom already covered this, however poorly. 

Ryan:  Well, this is the debate.  Since 1976 all of the undefeated teams have lost eventually.  There is certainly a lot of inherent pressure when you go into the tournament with that burden.  I think it is a good thing, frankly. 

For those keeping score at home, Ryan is drawing on a sample size of exactly two.  Larry Bird’s Indiana State in 1979, who lost to Magic Johnson’s vastly more talented Michigan State team in the NCAA finals; and 1991 UNLV, who lost to Duke in the national semi-finals.  Mike Krzyzewski has long stated that his speech to his team in the week before that game was that UNLV would crumble late in a close game because they hadn’t been in a close game before.  Memphis had already played several close games before Tennessee.  Again, nothing new or interesting to see here.  

Lupica:  Hey guess what, we saw the pressure—and I really believe now this applies—we saw the pressure of one beaten in the Super Bowl.  That was absolutely a factor in that football game.  As great as the Patriots have been, that was the elephant in the room that day.   

You have to love Lupica’s rhetorical flair.  He recognizes that when he interrupts himself with “I really believe now this applies,” we should take him very seriously, no matter how convoluted his syntax.  He also understands that whenever you use “absolutely,” the debate’s over, one’s interlocutors stymied.  As in, “You’d be absolutely, incomprehensibly stupid to state that it was the pass-rush of Strahan and Omenyiura and the no-show performance of Todd Light, rather than the pressure of being undefeated, that caused New England to lose the Super Bowl.” 

Also, in my Deep South high school we learned in English class to use the phrase “elephant in the room” to describe a factor that everybody knows is relevant but  for whatever reasons is uncomfortable talking about.  But I guess it works here, since Lupica’s the first person to talk about this.  Seriously, if this guy loved himself any more he’d be twins.

Albom:  And I’m sorry, but, make your free throws.  We’re all talking about what a great game it is, except at those moments.  College basketball especially—where it’s foul, timeout; foul, timeout—you better be able to do better than one of six down the stretch if you plan on winning any important games in March. 

Because this never happens in the NBA. 

Lupica:  What are (Memphis), 59% for the season.  And John (Calipari) says, “We’ll make them when we have to.”  And for them, it didn’t become a free throw game in the last couple of minutes, but it will be an issue going forward into the tournament, and you’re right.   

What exactly is a “free throw game?”  Memphis went 1-6 in the last five minutes of a game it lost by four points.  So it wasn’t an “issue” in that game.  But it will be an “issue going forward into the tournament.”  And Albom was right.  Excellent. 

Saunders:  So will rebounding.  (Memphis) were out-rebounded 46-31. 

Now Saunders is awake again.  He’s totally baiting Lupica here, trying to get him to flub his analysis of another statistic as badly as he did on free throw shooting.  Let’s watch. 

Ryan:  They were ferocious on the boards, seventeen offensive rebounds.  I thought a wonderful little subplot was the J.P. Prince story.  He’s from Memphis, wasn’t recruited by (Memphis), goes to Arizona, comes back (to the Vols), says he was dissed by Memphis twice.  Goes to bed the night before the game in Memphis shorts, and then he goes out and has this great second half. 

Ryan, bored with talking numbers, decides to switch to human interest stuff.  Perfectly understandable. 

Lupica:  In the non-Michael-Beasley world (hoarse laughter at his own one-liner), in the non-Michael-Beasley world, Derrick Rose is as good as there is in the country.  And he’s going to be a great tournament player.   

Lupica is also bored with John’s silly statistics.   

And I really, really feel bad for Mike Lupica’s wife.  Truly. 

Ryan:  Oh yeah. 

Does this mean that Ryan and Lupica agree that Rose is going to be better in the tournament than he has been in the regular season?  Is he going to stand out even more?  If so, why?  So few questions asked in this format…even fewer answered…and so many raised. 

Lupica:  Because when the ball’s in his hands, you just…That play he made when they ended up missing the lay-up last night, when he got in and somehow saw the guy standing out in the (inaudible), that’s just a great basketball play. 

I know what I just…when the ball is in Derrick Rose’s hands.  I ask myself, Will he dribble, will he pass, or will he shoot?  It’s riveting stuff, really, trying to figure out what this Derrick Rose is going to do next. 

As for the play he’s describing, if I have matched it up correctly, with 1:45 left in the game Rose got himself caught up in the air on the left baseline and managed to find an open teammate for a jumper from the opposite corner.  Me?  I’m not in love with my point guard getting hung up in the air having to throw a cross-court pass through two sets of arms in order to avoid a travel.

 (END OF SEGMENT)

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I have a hard time believing the egomaniacal Lupica was this out-of-control when Dick Schaap was hosting the show. But regardless, in today’s format Mike can be counted on to make the show simultaneously interesting and stupefying.

Then I found out I was moving, and I just decided to table the project until the spring when I got settled into the new place.  But ten days ago fate intervened in the form of a late-night message board riff.  The stuff I was working on ended up being far too long to post, so I emailed the proprietors of the site to see if they might have any interest in posting a series on why Tyler Hansbrough of UNC is so difficult to referee.  The response I got was fantastic, and before I knew it I had been given an opportunity to write my first column for the really good guys at dukebasketballreport.com.

I fully intended to use that space just to talk about calling plays, in hopes of giving some fans more insight into the way basketball officials think on the floor.  But the same night the first column went up, Georgetown-Villanova happened. I didn’t know whether the publishers at the DBR would even agree to put something up from me on consecutive days, but I simply had to get my thoughts down on the way that game’s ending was covered.  So after writing into the wee hours following the game, I submitted what I had, it was graciously accepted, and this was the result.

It was a huge step out for me, being far more of a media criticism piece than an officiating commentary. But in writing that column and reading the responses to it I was reminded of some of the media-and-officiating questions that I had considered previously, and even given some new ones to ponder.   So I decided to ride the momentum and start exploring in greater depth some of the bias issues that had interested me in the first place.  For as long as they’ll have me I’ll still to be writing a more middle-of-the-road column at the DBR, but I’m going to use this space to explore some more nuanced issues that come to me along the way.

Since the Georgetown-Villanova column I’ve had one more posted (apologies for the pdf;  I included a diagram in the column without considering formatting issues). In that column I developed a model of the basketball official’s thought process, one that I’m even a little  proud of. It needs some tweaking but I think it will provide a good springboard for helping to ground future columns.

My intent is to use this blog to try to test out new ideas. Right now I’m trying to work out some of the relationships between officiating/officiating commentary and cognitive dissonance (which is explored in fascinating ways here). I was also fortunate to get a kind response from another psychologist who reminded me of some of his own ideas that I had overlooked in his book that considers how too many choices can sometimes make life harder. 

In any event, some of the ideas that I throw out here will be good, some will be weak, and some will be just bad.  Through the writing and review process I hope to discard the bad ideas, strengthen the weak ones and fine-tune the good.  To that end, I appreciate any and all criticism or suggestions.  So let’s have some fun thinking about play-calling, why it happens the way it does, and why people talk about it the way they do.  Cheers.

 tpc