“Our conference is in the worst condition officiating I’ve ever seen. When people come out and steal basketball games from our young people like that crew did, they deserve to be put in jail and not working basketball games” – Lute Olson, March 6, 1982
Me and Lute, two pees in a pod. Unfortunately neither of us had any statistical base to make the claim, just a gut feeling that what we're watching is far below par.
But then I got really frustrated after the Arizona at Washington game - that was one of the worst reffed games I'd seen. So last week I started looking for stats and found KenPom's referee ratings. He basically rates refs by seeing how often they're reffing the best games in basketball. It's not a perfect system but it makes some sense.
I wanted to see how each conference stacked up so I looked at only conference games. Also, I only included the power six and a single mid major conference for comparison because this isn't my job.
I took KenPom's top 50 refs of each year and accumulated every game they reffed over the last three seasons (season to date to Feb 5th and the previous two years). Then I tallied how many times they refereed each conference - that's the pool. Finally, I tallied the total number of games each conference employed a top 50 ref and produced a percentage of top 50 presence for each conference. That's top ref presence.
It's not an exact measure, not nearly, but could it provide some perspective? See below:
Winners and Losers
Let's start with % share. The ACC and the B1G are the big winners here, each getting about 20% of the pool. The Big XII, Big East, and SEC each clock in the respectable mid-low teens... and then there's the Pac-12. The Pac-12 is in the single digits along with our mid-major for reference conference, the A-10.
Wait... what?
Not that there's anything wrong with the A-10, but as far as I can tell from public resources they make about a third of the revenue as the Pac-12.
Maybe the Pac-12 deserves it - we're the sixth worst conference in basketball, right?
Well let's compare ref rankings against KenPom's conference rankings and see if there are any correlations or curiosities...
The winner here is clearly the B1G, getting the most quality ref presences while performing near the bottom of the conference ranking. On the other hand... the Big XII is getting hosed as the three year best conference in basketball with only the fourth most quality ref presences.
Now I don't know if the KenPom ref rankings are "good" or if there is regional restrictions on refs and how far they travel. Maybe the Big XII aren't getting their due because their arenas aren't near airport hubs (I have no idea if this is true but I do know that Texas Tech is in Lubbock). Maybe the distance between Pac-12 schools and then the further distance between the Pac-12 and other conferences precludes big game refs from working our games. There's a whole basket of stuff that I don't know, and I don't even know how big the basket is.
What I do know is that the Pac-12 has the worst goddamn refs of the power six conferences and Lute Olson is as right as his hair is white.
