One last comment on the tournaments and refereeing, really officiating in general. I played, coached, root and watch for the human aspect. The challenge and testing of oneself in competition with other people. I don’t watch for officiating, except very much in the moment, and couldn’t care less about bad calls, part of the human experience. I hate replays and call reversals, clock resets, etc. because it is absolutely and utterly IMPOSSIBLE to “get it right”. I never felt that officials decided games, except in very, very rare cases.
So certain plays can be reviewed and reversed, clocks can be reviewed at certain times and everyone ignores the inherent unfairness and intrusion into the result of the games that creates. The loss of time 2 minutes into the game can have as much an effect as the last 2 minutes, an improper awarding of the ball to the wrong team on an out of bounds play in the beginning of the game can do exactly the same.
Further, officials every minute they are on a field or court make instantaneous subjective decisions as to what to call or not call. Certain rules are applied or not, whether by direction or evolution.
One example, watch how many times in any game a person taking the ball out of bound technically walks by not keeping a pivot foot, never called.
Another issue, the proliferation of “dives” on 3 point shots, some worthy of soccer players being one breath away from an ambulance, only to instantly recover and resume normal play. Almost always fouls are called, and as far as I know not reviewable.
And certainly I could go on and on. Officiating by it’s very nature will never be anything resembling perfect or fair.
I certainly realize we are not going back, that the use of technology and the effect, IMO, that the ludicrously popular “talking head” community has had on sports is only going to get worse but sports were much more enjoyable to me before the intrusion of technology and the influence of the next day “Monday Morning quarterbacking“ by people who have nothing to do with the games except to apply agendas by being able to pick apart any play or call with the advantage of 6,000 angles complete with slo mo and stop action.
