The Nightcap

Girls basketball recap: Earlier this evening, with Rutgers head coach Vivian Stringer looking snappy in a pink suit and her team wearing uniforms of the same color to promote breast cancer awareness, the Scarlett Knight appeared headed to an upset victory over the Lady Vols, but some suspicious timekeeping resulted in a bitter defeat for the team in the pink shoes.

Men's basketball recap: Villanova wanted to do their part to raise awareness of breast cancer, but rather than wear pink, they chose to shoot the ball as if they were a girls basketball team, going 4 for 31 from the field in the 2nd half. Still, the Wildcats were in a position to send the game into position to send the game into overtime until referee Bob Donato called this foul in the back court with 0.1 seconds on the clock:



It was a horrendous call, but perhaps Donato was just trying to spare the viewing public from five more minutes of unwatchable basketball.

On a related note, here's the introductory piece to a synopsis of a NCAA tournament game in 2000 between North Carolina and Tennessee, composed by Sports Illustrated writer, Alexander Wolff:

There's a kind of voyeuristic pleasure in watching a ref who has whistled a really, really bad call. A call that you know is wrong, I know is wrong, and every soul in the building knows is wrong, except for the pitiable chump in the piebald pullover who made it.

The ref being discussed here is none other than one Robert Donato.

Who knows- maybe Donato is sick of living on the east coast and figures that if he makes enough high profile, egregious errors then he'll be a lock to get a job as part of a Pac-10 crew.

Meanwhile, Bill McCabe, the Pac 10's coordinator of officiating, has ruled that firing a ball off an opponent's face at point blank range is a perfectly acceptable way of avoiding a five second call. My first reaction to this decision was that McCabe was obviously a spineless idiot whose fear of extending the controversy by handing down any sort of punishment (or even warnings) would lead to an injury or brawl during a game when a similar strategy is employed. But it turns out that in his spare time, Mr. McCabe also owns a medical equipment distribution company. I'm guessing sales on protective masks are down this year, and this would provide a quick boost. Very shrewd, Mr. McCabe. Very shrewd, indeed.

UCLA was considering appealing this ruling to the NCAA, but fortunately was able to negotiate a deal. The Bruins will publicly support the decision that it was just a "player doing what was necessary to win," and in exchange, the NCAA will never make the Bruins play a tournament game in Hec Edmunson Pavilion, the home of the Washington Huskies and a perennial house of horrors for the Bruins.

In football news, the Washington Post is reporting that the Redskins are interested in making a trade for Chad Johnson. If that deal goes through, it would be a great move for Ocho Cinco. Johnson sees himself as a future hall of famer, and the recent induction of Art Monk has shown that the Redskins are capable of getting good, but not great wide receivers into the hall if they put in their time.

The Dolphins have cut quarterback Trent Green as part of their process of cleaning house. The good news for fans of Green is that he wasn't upset by the move at all since he didn't even remember that he was a quarterback for the Dolphins. The bad news is that Green was only two more head traumas away from being giving a job as a lead analyst for ESPN.