Shameful officiating

I wouldn't call that a disparity.

But, I remember Robinson being frustrated with the lack of equality.

I believe we have an image problem. Having spent so much time swirling the bottom of the conference in the major sports has solidified and perpetuated OSU as the weak link in the conference. Shedding that reputation will be very difficult. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond me, our own fans reinforce this negative image way too often as we struggle to produce winning programs and Joe fan isn't seeing the improvement they think should be there.

I believe that negative image haunts us constantly as anyone who is remotely paying attention to our conference, including all referees on the known planet, are being fed a negative image of OSU athletics. We need a culture shift.

I think it has been painfully obvious there is a bias against OSU if you take a wide look at how our women's team is being "treated" by officials in and out of our conference. I try to be objective, but I think it's become apparent that we are absolutely not being given the respect that you would expect a three time conference champ would be given. Our competition is routinely being allowed to be extremely physical with us. Even at home. Would that be happening to UCLA or Stanford? I don't think so. But then, those schools have a very different reputation in the minds of the average sports fan. You can't tell me referees are immune to those kinds of bias.

We have a messaging problem. First order of business, our own fans need to stop running down our own school and what our perceived shortcomings are. I see so many OSU fans perpetuating how disadvantaged we are because we aren't, for instance, located in big city, when in many cases that is actually a good thing. Beavs need to stop with the negative pollyanna line of thinking just because we have a rough spell in football or basketball. That kind of thing gets into the minds of everyone, and then we find ourselves getting calls from referees at home games as though we are on the road.

"It" is a multifaceted issue. There is one overriding factor IMHO... the Pac12 conference itself.

While Larry Scott has done many fine things, the one area that has truly gotten worse is officiating. To me as long as you subcontract officials working in multiple conferences you'll always have inferior officials. There is truly a very limited evaluation process and even less disciplinary avenues. As a few close friends have shared, they've had to work with some of the worst "people" let alone officials. Even they have very limited recourse I assignments/crew choices.

Larry and the Pac12 office like to portray the "Conference of Champions", but have allowed very mediocre to terrible performances in this area with little effort to improve.

Behind close doors officials themselves have tried to get a Pac12 crew type pool... but, thete is a shortage of interest with the scheduling all over the map and travel. There was a move for part to be multiple sport certified to get a solid base of officials to the supplement to.

Bottom line, finding officials is tough at every level... finding quality even harder... finding those that also love the job and the game enough to show integrity seems almost impossible.

However, it doesn't mean the Pac12 can just look the other way. We may have lots of "titles", but one of them is the worst officiated major/P5 Conference.

The refs were awful, but so was our free throw shooting. Besides Tres, everyone on our team is terrible at it. It seems like we have been terrible at shooting FT for years, including under Robinson. Have both coaches deemphasized FT in practice? The Thompson brothers should be able to make FT as coaches sons and as shooters, but they both are mediocre at it as well. I'm not sure if it's a lack of focus or what, but that has been the most frustrating thing for me. When they are 1-6 at one point and 8-16 overall (.711 on the season, propped up by Tres), that is embarrassingly terrible. I've never played anywhere near the level of college basketball (intramurals is the highest level for me) but I would think someone who works that hard on their game should at least hit 80% or 90% of the free throws.

ReallY?  IMHO, the Larry Scott era has just been one CF after another...  Terrible TV Network going nowhere, can't get on DirectTV, Can't figure out officiating, has done nothing to improve our national presence or somehow combat the fact that we are slowly slipping from a P5 conference into a G5 conference.  SEC is backed by ESPN, sure...  but they are running laps around Scott and the Pac-12...  We need a new comish!

As far as officiating goes, I want to be able to cry foul, but I also don't know what the solution is...  Seems like the NFL and NBA refs aren't all that much better.  I agree the officiating has been terrible this year, but it is par for the course and every fan forum says the same thing after every loss...

It's long past due for a national referee system managed by the NCAA for football and men's basketball, maybe women's too. It doesn't make sense for all these separate conferences to try to manage, evaluate and schedule officials. It's been clear for some time that PAC-12 football officials call more penalties than other conferences, especially related to targeting and celebration penalties.