To cut through all the biased garbage
O.K., I want us to win and UNC to lose, but let's be realistic. I recorded the game and watched it before knowing the outcome. I replayed the calls of the refs throughout the entire game and also replayed in slo-mo most of the calls I thought they should have made. I think the calls were spot-on the first half, except for the many times the Georgetown players blatantly pushed off the UNC guys on the in-bounds passes after UNC baskets. Obviously, that means I think that UNC should have had more of the calls in their favor.
The crowd did not see what I could see during slo-mo replays, and therefore got on the refs. The result of which really intimidated the refs so that they stopped calling fouls against Georgetown a lot during the beginning of the first half. There were a number of really bad fouls under the basket that should have been called against Georgetown, including one where a UNC player came up with a tough rebound and the Georgetown player grabbed him by the neck and began to pull him down. The UNC player pulled away and went down the court with a no-call by the refs. It continued from there with more arms and elbow pushing along with gabbing by Georgetown players resulting in no-calls.
After that, the UNC guys began to push back some, resulting in no-calls again. And so it went. Because Georgetown was more physical, they won out. The refs did it. In my opinion, they lost control of the game due to the intimidation factor of the fans. When that happened, instead of Roy and the UNC whinning about the no-calls, the UNC team just tried to fight back physically, and got out-manned. Then they missed like 23 shots in a row due to immature shot selection and execution.
I don't think it was a case of the fans wanting the refs to let them play, ala the Connecticut massacre of us by the refs a few years ago in the FF, where even the UCONN fans were the loudest chanting "let them play"--and that was during the bad calls on Shav and the rest of our players.
I don't think the refs were fair to UNC or to college bball fans. If Fla and Georgetown make the final game and the refs do the same, it could get pretty violent considering how emotional some of the Fla players are.
I know I'm opening up the possibility of a lot of negative comments here to this post, but I gotta call 'em as I see 'em. I love Duke and dislike UNC, but I can't let that interfere with my judgement of what I feel is an injustice.
Oh, and did you catch the absolutely stupid replay and remarks by Billy Packer on the "travel" dispute? He aired the replay that definitely showed the pivot (right) foot being moved and reset even before the move to the basket that should have been labelled as the original violation. Then he ignores it and says that the replay is not a travel because of stuff after that not even pertains to that initial movement. Then he refers back to it and claims that the refs can't see everything that happens so fast during a game, and that things don't get called because of that and that's the reason it was a fair call. What a bunch of garbage. He does that all the time. Check it out, Feldspar.
ricks
as been their achilles "heel" during close games.
