Officials in UNC's upset of Baylor shouldn't be rewarded with more NCAA Tournament games | Opinion

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However you want to remember North Carolina 93, Baylor 86 — a portrait of great resolve for the Tar Heels, a nearly miraculous comeback effort by the Bears, a slow-motion trainwreck — let’s acknowledge that this game happened Saturday and never speak of it again. 

And let’s hope the officials who worked it won’t be rewarded with any more games in this NCAA Tournament. 

Ultimately, North Carolina was the deserving and rightful winner in its round of 32 victory, ending Baylor's national title defense and showing some real mental toughness in overtime after blowing a 25-point lead with 10:49 remaining. As shook as the Tar Heels were down the stretch — it looked at times like they’d never practiced against a full-court press — being able to regroup and win the game was impressive. 

But what happened in the second half of that game in particular illustrates why college basketball, apart from the one-and-done drama we get in March, has mostly become a niche product.

It’s poorly and inconsistently officiated. It’s overly physical. And it leads to clunky, ugly basketball where nearly every drive to the basket turns into an outright mugging — whether it’s called or not. 

“North Carolina and Baylor are playing a physical, tough, competitive game,” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas tweeted. “But it’s not basketball. It’s hockey and rugby. This has been happening all season, and needs to change.”

Unfortunately, the thing we’ll remember most from North Carolina’s victory is how far out of their depth Donnie Eppley, Brent Hampton and Kipp Kissinger were as they tried to manage what was happening out there on the floor. 

If you aren’t familiar with those three names, that’s a good thing. College basketball officials aren’t supposed to be celebrities, but they are part of the game. Eppley, Hampton and Kissinger are veterans who work in the major conferences. In theory, they should be among the best at what they do. But their performance was an utter disgrace, and it wasn’t necessarily exclusive to either team. Both Baylor and UNC had legitimate gripes throughout the course of the game.

When a game is as physical and chippy as this one was from the start, the referees have to get it under control right away. Instead, they let a lot of things go in the first half, only to start calling it really tight when the second half began. 

In the first eight minutes of the second half, Baylor was called for nine fouls to UNC’s two. Then with 10:08 remaining and the game seemingly well in hand, Tar Heels big man Brady Manek was ejected for what looked like an overly aggressive box-out on Jeremy Sochan with an inadvertent elbow.

There were a few ways that play could have been officiated. It could have been a standard foul on Manek. It could have been a foul on both players, since Sochan certainly had some culpability in instigating the situation with a push. It also could have just been a flagrant-1 for Manek, which would have given Baylor two free throws and the ball but kept him in the game. 

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Instead, Manek was gone. And perhaps because of the score — UNC led 67-42 at the time — the officials responded by completely swallowing their whistles for the next several minutes. 

At that point, the game wasn’t just dangerous — it was out of control. 

Baylor’s aggression on the full-court press paid off, as North Carolina did almost everything wrong tactically to try and break it. But the refusal to call fouls on Baylor at that point in the game escalated the physicality to the point where both teams had little discipline on closeouts or trying to defend the post. 

Somewhere between the hacking, reaching and leg-kicking that wasn’t being called, there was a pretty good game happening. 

Baylor came into the tournament as the most vulnerable No. 1 seed because of injuries to forward Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua and leading scorer LJ Cryer, and it would have been easy to accept that fate after 30 minutes when almost nothing had gone right for the Bears. 

Instead, they clawed all the way back and put the pressure on a North Carolina team — and a first-year head coach in Hubert Davis — who didn’t handle it particularly well down the stretch of regulation. Between coughing it up against the press, missing three free throws in the final 38 seconds and failing to get even a decent shot after a timeout with 11 seconds left in regulation, this was right on the verge of being remembered as the worst choke job in tournament history. 

But North Carolina got it together in overtime, and the friendly whistle Baylor got in the second half completely flipped. Perhaps the most crushing call was one that could have been reversed on replay had it occurred two seconds later: Down 86-85 with 2:02 left, the officials did not see that a rebound went out of bounds off North Carolina and instead called it off Baylor’s Adam Flagler. 

North Carolina got another chance, converted a layup, and Baylor never pulled any closer.

In the end, it was probably a just result. North Carolina was the better team for longer portions of the game, but it certainly wasn’t pretty. 

The teams deserve some blame for that, but the level of officiating — not just in this game, but the entire tournament so far — has been both a concern and a talking point among several administrators who have shared their opinions with Paste BN Sports. 

Everyone knows it's a tough job out there to get everything right, and college basketball officials are independent contractors who do not work specifically for the NCAA or any conference. Many of them, if not most, have full-time day jobs and spend their winters traveling the country as a side job.

The NCAA’s job is to evaluate and hire the top-ranked officials to work in the tournament, then advance the crews who are doing the best job to the next round. By this point, you’re supposed to have the elite of the elite. 

That wasn’t the case on Saturday, and hopefully we won't see those officials again until next season.