Arena officials told reporters that the clock is controlled remotely by a device connected wirelessly to the officials' whistles. There isn't a guy at the scorer's table who can push a button to stop the clock and extend the final play for the home team.
Replays clearly showed that the foul was whistled well after the clock reached 0, and ESPN clocked the last 0.2 seconds taking 1.3 seconds to tick off.
Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer said she and her assistant coaches were already celebrating, thinking they'd knocked off a No. 1 team for the second game in a row following their win over UConn last Tuesday, when one of them noticed that the clock had stopped. Stringer made a point not to accuse Tennessee -- "It's not Pat's fault. It's not Tennessee's fault" -- but also said, "This should not be tolerated."
She's right. In a post-Tim Donaghy world, sports leagues should be going the extra mile to make sure games aren't decided in such a way as to make it look like the fix is in. I don't know what anyone can do about an official making a stupid judgment call with 0.1 second left, as happened at Georgetown, but something can definitely be done about that Tennessee-Rutgers finish.
Officials routinely gather around a video monitor to determine if a shot was released before the end of a half or if a shooter stepped on the three-point line. They often do this even when the play was fairly obvious to the naked eye. Just to be sure.
But in a huge, nationally televised game involving the teams that played for the championship last year, the refs can't or won't look at the video that clearly shows the clock stopping for a full second with 0.2 to play? The Sports Network reported Stringer saying an official told her they'd reviewed the play, but if they watched that replay and didn't see that the clock stopped at 0.2 and the foul occurred after the game should have ended, all the clichés about three blind mice and so on are true.
"The clock was stopped," Stringer said after the game. "That's the reason there was time for a foul to occur."
Now officials are in a no-win situation. The right thing to do would be to award Rutgers the victory. But at this late date -- after everybody's left the floor -- that would look just as bad as Tennessee's win does. When you go around reversing scores after the fact it carries the whiff of the fix being in just as much as a stopped clock does.
We hear so much bloviating from people in my line of work about performance-enhancing drugs damaging the integrity of games, and what a terrible, intolerable thing that is. But when officials screw up and hand the game over to the home team, everybody shrugs. Hey, human error. Happens. Whaddaya gonna do?
Something. Ought to do something. It shouldn't be that difficult to get things right, or to make them right when human error does happen.
Rutgers lost a game to Stanford three months ago when Epiphanny Prince was called for a foul on Candice Wiggins 80 feet away from the basket with the score tied and 0.1 second left. Wiggins sunk both free throws.
Stringer used the same phrase that night that she did Monday night: "It is what it is."
It shouldn't be.
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his Facebook page.
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