WAC not tolerating blown calls
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
Apparently there's nothing like an open week on the University of Hawai'i football schedule to inspire the conspiracy theorists among us.
With the next Warrior game Nov. 15 at Nevada, there's a whole week to hatch theories why the Western Athletic Conference chose to suspend the officiating crew that worked UH's controversial 13-10 victory at San Jose State.
Beside the fact that they blew it at the end, I mean.
Space does not permit a thorough listing of all the imagined plots and surmised skullduggery. But here are a few gems culled from the many making the rounds:
- WAC commissioner Karl Benson suspended the refs because he wanted to curry favor with San Jose State, the one team that isn't threatening to leave the conference.
- The WAC office was upset that June Jones skipped a conference function and sent an assistant coach instead.
- The WAC is mad that Jones is leaving for the Denver Broncos after this season.
Somebody said Oliver Stone was in the Islands, but not until now did we believe it.
It was a gutsy call by referee Gene Semko, one of the most able refs around, to overrule the clock operator in front of the home crowd, even if the Spartans' fans numbered just 8,000 or so. The hearts of Hawai'i fans were naturally with him as the results of The Advertiser's "Grading the game" on-line voting indicated. For the first time this season, the officials got a higher grade (B) than the coaches (C).
But, as Benson put it, "there has to be a threshold somewhere" on officiating errors and increasingly conferences are choosing to come down hard when they have potential to impact games.
You might remember Benson set a WAC threshold early in his administration, sanctioning respected basketball referee Lonnie Dixon in 1998 after a particularly egregious call in a nationally televised Utah-New Mexico game.
As Frank White, a Honolulu-based WAC referee puts it, "We have to take the good with the bad."
For years, coaches, fans and media have lamented that little seems to happen to game officials. After a Pac-10 crew came off looking like the Keystone Kops in the UH game at Southern California, Jones bemoaned the errors would only be reflected in their conference evaluations.
Said Jones: "They're not gonna penalize them for it. They'll have a beer on Friday, rewind the tapes and say, 'Yeah, we were wrong.' "
But not in the WAC. Not now.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.
