The Book of Jobbed #1: Rules, Hamlet, and the UConn-Iowa Women's Basketball Game
UConn’s final possession in Friday night’s Women’s Final Four game against Iowa poses a tricky philosophical question rivaled only by Hamlet’s conundrum. To enforce the rules or not to enforce the rules, that is the question.
Let me put it another way. If rules can only be imperfectly enforced and referees should avoid being a game’s deciding factor, then is it better to enforce a rule or to not enforce a rule in a game’s deciding moment?
With under ten seconds to go in what was a riveting back and forth, and ESPN’s highest rated basketball broadcast on record, UConn guard Paige Bueckers ran along the three-point line while teammate Aaliyah Edwards attempted to block an Iowa defender, Gabbie Marshall, from trailing Bueckers by setting a screen.
For the uninitiated, a screen is simply standing in place and impeding the progress of another player. It’s like watching a guy run into a light pole.
To set a legal screen, a few things must not be happening. You must not be moving, your feet must not be wider than shoulder width apart, you must not be extending your body to make contact with your opponent.
But Edwards was moving, her feet were wider than a shoulder width apart, and she was extending her body to make contact with her opponent. It was literally textbook. Don’t take my word for it. Read page 87 of the rule book.
The ref blew the whistle. UConn lost possession of the ball, and what followed was maybe the funniest way to lose a basketball game: intentionally fouling, forgetting to try and get a rebound, getting hit in the back on an inbound pass when you aren’t paying attention.
The game was an instant classic. There was also instant internet discourse. Because of course there was. The complaints generally fell into one of three categories.
COMPLAINT CATEGORY 1: CONSPIRACY
The first, and funniest, was that this was part of a grand conspiracy to increase television revenue. The decision to blow the whistle was obviously made by the NCAA and Mickey Mouse himself. Either in a smokey boardroom and a parking garage conspicuously empty of anyone trying to remember where they parked their car.
Iowa Point Guard Caitlin Clark is very much the center point of a cultural phenomenon, and with her continuing to play in the NCAA Tournament, it stands to reason that the TV ratings will be higher than were she to have not made the championship game.
This is my way of conceding that there would be a motivation for referees, who are (part-time) employees of the NCAA, to unduly influence the outcome of a game. It is not as though basketball officiating is immune from credible accusations of corruption, as NBA referee Tim Donaghy can attest.
Donaghy’s case, though, was not tied to a conspiracy spearheaded by the NBA to ensure Dwayne Wade, Shaquille O'Neal, and the Miami Heat made it to the Championship game. He was motivated by personal greed. The FBI investigated him not because they were Detroit Pistons fans, but because Donaghy was alleged to have bet on games he officiated.
Sports gambling in the United States has exploded into a $10 billion industry within only a five year period of legality. With how much money is involved and how easy it is to place bets, it would be naive to assume that sports officiating is one hundred percent on the level one hundred percent of the time.
In fact, you can routinely find me on Twitter semi-seriously calling for a congressional investigation into football officiating anytime the referees make a call on a team I am personally rooting for. In my wildest dreams, this investigation would be chaired by Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana because I think it would be funny to hear a guy with his accent ask someone to explain pass interference.
I am extremely skeptical, though, that any form of officiating corruption could possibly come from the NCAA. Not because I think it’s a good and righteous organization, to be clear. On the contrary, it’s a corrupt and morally bankrupt institution that could be called the worst entity in sports if it wasn’t for the outlandish demonspawn running FIFA, soccer’s global governing body.
No, I think it’s impossible for the NCAA to have intervened in this game or in any other game because they are hilariously and uniquely incompetent. As former sports broadcaster Andy Garman put it: “The NCAA couldn’t schedule a press conference without a forklift interrupting things. I doubt they can rig a final four game.”
COMPLAINT CATEGORY 2: CONSISTENCY
The second category of complaints center around the fact that moving screens happen all the time and are not called consistency, so it feels wrong or suspect for it to happen at such a defining moment.
To argue about whether or not the game was called consistently and fairly would require going through all the game tape, meticulously reviewing each individual possession.
I am not going to do that. I’m going to die one day and don’t want to spend my limited time on earth doing that.
Besides, everyone knows high level athletics, with its incredible speed, is notoriously difficult to officiate correctly. It necessitates split second information processing and decision making. Per a post on something called The Pudding I found while Googling around:
Since March 2015, the NBA has reviewed 26,822 plays from 1,476 games. In those 4,297 minutes of action, the officials have missed or incorrectly called 2,197 plays, or about 8.2% of all calls reviewed. This amounts to 1.49 wrong decisions in the final minutes of each close game.
As demonstrated earlier in this piece, though, the call people are arguing about was not an incorrect call. No one is seriously arguing that Edwards correctly set her screen and was not in violation of any rules. Additionally, you only need to turn to page 5 of the 2023-2024 rule book to find that calling illegal screens was a point of emphasis for officials refereeing basketball games. The refs were, quite literally, doing their job, however imperfectly.
But if the ideal is to take the referees’ fingers off the scale entirely, one could argue that the waning seconds of a basketball game are so paramount that a different rule set should be implemented, that only the most egregious actions be penalized. This strikes me as odd. While the last possessions may feel important, they are no more or less an opportunity to score points than any of those that came before.
And it is not as though possessions are at a premium in a basketball game. It’s generally agreed that an average college basketball team is going to get around 70 possessions or chances to score over the course of a game. Compare this to baseball ( where teams have, at minimum, 27 chances) or College Football (where teams only get around 13 possessions on average).
COMPLAINT CATEGORY 3: CULTURE
This ideal, that referees should not impact the final moments of a game, is the focus of the third category of people criticizing the outcome of the UConn-Iowa matchup.
It was illustrated best by Diana Taurasi (UConn alum) and Sue Bird (another UConn alum) while they hosted a secondary ESPN broadcast of the game. When the whistle blew, they were pissed. Royally pissed. Especially Taurasi.
“That was a terrible call,” she said. “We always talk about, ‘let the players decide the game,’ especially a benign call like that where you really didn’t even affect the player. They still got over the screen. It’s just tough to end a game like that.”
There are two complaints here. One implicit, one explicit.
The explicit complaint here is that this call violated an unwritten rule in athletics that referees should not unduly influence the outcome of a game.
I’ve already made the general counterargument to this move so won’t repeat it outside of a parenthetical (UConn had plenty of other opportunities to put points on the board), but find it odd to say that the players did not decide the game. It is not as though the referee in this instance was reacting to something which did not occur. This rule violation was textbook and was something referees were instructed to look out for.
But we also know that the referee’s decision to not make a call is just as impactful as their decision to make a call. The best example that comes to mind is from another sport: the 2018 playoff game between the St. Louis Los Angeles Rams and the New Orleans Saints, which was won by the Rams after the referees did as Taurasi would have asked and left the game in the players hands. They did not call an incredibly obvious pass interference penalty. The NFL was heavily and correctly criticized in its aftermath.
The implicit complaint Taurasi is making is that it’s tough for her to see her alma mater lose.
TO ENFORCE THE RULES OR NOT TO ENFORCE THE RULES?
It would seem to me that the honest answer to the question I opened this piece with is that “the refs should make whichever decision benefits the team I’m personally rooting for.”
As a sports observer with a passing affinity for the St. Louis Los Angeles Rams, I thought the missed pass interference call was incorrect, but I also did not care. My team was ging to the Super Bowl. That’s what mattered to me.
I’ve been on the wrong end of this too. As a close follower of Michigan Football, don’t get me started on The Spot.
But as a lifelong Iowa fan since about 7:46 PM PT Friday night, it was clear to me the referees made not only the right call, but the fair one.
Taurasi and Bird are free to disagree. The Venn diagram of people upset about the foul and the people who were rooting for UConn is probably a circle. They’re experiencing a form of mourning, and I don’t see any benefit to arguing with people in a state of mourning. They’re making emotional arguments. You can’t tell people how or what they’re feeling is wrong.
But from a ten thousand foot view, if the cultural norm in athletics is that the final moments of a game should not be regulated by referees at all, it’s tantamount to saying the Whose Line maxim: “the rules are all made up and the points don’t matter.”
However you feel about this particular call or the arguments I’ve presented here, I do know there’s one thing we can all agree on. And that’s that it would be hilarious if the UConn Men’s Basketball Team lost the national championship game they’re playing on Monday because the referees decided not to call a moving screen foul in the final seconds.