How shall I put this in a sportsmanlike way?
In an ESPN box score I just looked at shortly after the KU-MSU game, it indicates the refs called 16 fouls on KU and 14 on MSU.
It looks pretty symmetric, doesn't it?
Its highly improbable the jobs the referees did will ever be questioned by the talking heads in the media, nor will the NCAA leadership call for a review of the game's officiating. How could they? The refs called 16 on KU and 14 on MSU. It looks so, so, so fair on paper.
But I suspect many, if not most, KU fans that watched what appeared to this KU fan to be one of the truly disgraceful refereeing spectacles, in what has become a frequent recurrence of disgraceful refereeing spectacles besmirching the first, or second, greatest spectacle in sport, would recognize a couple inconsistencies in the referee's calls between an experienced, highly skilled basketball team (KU) and a green bunch of typically hard nosed MSU bruisers.
Fouls called on KU were mostly reaching fouls, being brutally charged into and being called ludicrously for a defensive foul, or just plain phantom fouls, like the one in which Josh Jackson was called for going over the back on a rebound in the second half, and the overhead camera showed unmistakably that there was NO contact at all.
Fouls called on MSU appeared anecdotally mostly ones where KU players were layed out on the floor, or suffered sudden changes in vector direction and momentum, after the contact, or close lined (Josh nearly getting beheaded on the sideline near mid court in the second half).
Of course, in every apparently egregiously asymmetrically whistled game, it appears to be the no-calls that really tell the story. No-calls appear to be how the refs really give one team the winning edge, and the other the short shrift. The actual asymmetric calls appear just to let the teams know which team is going to be favored. By comparison, it appears to be the no-calls that can keep inferior teams in games, and sometimes even allow them to upset opponents.
I think reciting the no calls, which might amount to as many as 4 per MSU possession during the first 30 minutes of the game would be kicking MSU when they are down and that is something no KU fan should ever do. MSU did not hire the refs. MSU did not ask for an asymmetric whistle. MSU just played the cards they were dealt. And a damned good set of calls and no calls it appeared to be.
If KU had not been so resilient, experienced, skilled, athletic, and poised, the outcome might have been different; that's how much the refs appeared to mean to this game.
Without putting too fine a point on it, it is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that KU might have beaten MSU 130-50, if the refs would have appeared to have blown even a reasonably symmetric whistle for most of the game.
But the refs appeared to say "phooey!" on synmmetry.
It would be futile (and foolish) to speculate what might be the motivation of referees to call a game the way this one was called.
Suffice it to say that even my wife, who rarely watches a basketball game and is not a KU grad, or even a big time KU fan, said it was appalling how much the referees appeared to favor MSU for extended stretches.
The only further thought of yours truly worth noting has nothing to do with referees' motivations, at all.
As a result of calling the game as the referees did, whatever their actual motivations may have been (and I do not speculate on that at all), it is a reasonable inference to draw that if the game had been called with more apparent symmetry that fans of MSU and of the Big Ten and of Eastern Time Zone basketball generally, would likely have quit watching sometime in the first half, because KU would have been too far ahead for MSU to have more than a remote chance of winning.
But again, I have not a single clue why the referees actually did call the game the way they did. It is a mystery to me. My best guess is that it is an utter coincidence that the way they called the game appeared to keep an EST and a Big Ten team in the game. They must have just been having a bad day.
Down the stretch, when KU's athleticism and experience and skill were allowed to assert themselves for what really amounted to a very short part of the game, KU literally blew MSU out of the arena.
And except for FTs and some steals, KU didn't really even play all that unusually well.
To be generous and respectful to Coach Izzo and his Spartans, they are a young team and have the makings of maturing into one of Coach Izzo's frequently fine teams.
Alas, I regret to add I lack the same optimism about this team of referees improving similarly by next season.
Rock Chalk!!!
(Note: of course, all of the above is opining and speculation by a fan from a remote location. God only knows what was really going on. It may have been the most fairly called game in the last 100 years or so.)
