Speechless

Utterly speechless.

UCLA 77, Stanford 67 (OT)

I'm not even going to attempt to analyze this game. I don't have the stomach for it. Suffice it to say that a well-played, hard-fought Stanford road victory at a national powerhouse was negated-- utterly negated-- by one of the worst calls I have ever seen in my life. Lawrence Hill plays textbook perfect defense to block a Darren Collison drive with 2 seconds left-- and gets called for a foul. On the fucking best free throw shooter in the entire Pac-10 conference. Regardless of the number of replays you look at-- and there were at least two, one of them on the X-mo slow motion camera-- Hill's arms did not so much as graze Collison's. If there was any body contact whatsoever, and I'm not convinced there was, it was incidental lower-body contact initiated by Collison. Even at full speed, it was one of the most obvious clean blocks I've ever seen.

The officiating throughout this game was as godawful as Pac-10 officiating usually is, but that call was something else. You thought the Villanova foul-90-feet-from-the-basket call was wrong? (And it was...) This was worse. Not only was it the officials deciding the game instead of the play on the court, which has to happen sometimes, it was simply a flagrantly bad call. It would have been a flagrantly bad call in the first minute of a game. And it decided both a. a top-10 matchup, and b. the Pac-10 conference title. You think that might have been a time to let them play, refs?

The overtime at that point was a foregone conclusion. There's no way you recover from that. Just despicable.