A Disparity in Officiating: Different Conference Championships Have Different Numbers of Officials

When videos went up on YouTube last night of the men’s 200 medley relay at the 2014 Pac 12 Men’s Championships, I got a text from a couple of head coaches in other conferences noting something odd, and told to look at the bulkheads.

So I went back for another watch, and sure enough, the bulkheads are bare. There’s not a pair of navy, nor khaki, nor god-forbid white pants upon them.

The same can be seen at the Big Ten Championships in the video below:

We confirmed again in prelims on Thursday morning at Pac 12’s that there were no officials working the bulkhead.

We thought that was odd as well, and began asking around. Two coaches in the ACC confirmed that they had officials on the bulkhead. The SEC is always loaded with officials, and we knew they were covered. The AAC and Big 12 also had officials on their bulkheads. Video of Big East’s shows officials on the bulkhead.

The two that emerged without were the Big Ten and the Pac 12.

If one were to pull out relays DQ’s, there wasn’t a significant number of differences in DQ calls between for example the SEC and the Big Ten. The SEC had 10 individual event DQ’s for a men’s and women’s combined meet; the Big Ten had 4 on the men’s side and 8 on the women’s. Limited numbers, though, wouldn’t bear out any sort of reference-worthy trend anyway.

But there’s still more calls that are missed than need to be. Parents sitting in the stands can see the calls, because of the angle (and especially so as more and more meets are being televised and there’s a greater-and-greater glare from the bright lights). Everyone’s favorite disqualification these days is the double dolphin kick on breaststroke, and the further away the official is from the swimmer, the harder it is to see. That’s why it’s of ever-greater importance to have the officials on the bulkheads watching the middle lanes, because it’s possible that they’re being disproportionately saved from DQ’s because they’re harder to see from the sides of the pool.

But officiating in college swimming, like in most college sports, is heavily localized at the conference level, and that means that conference championship meets don’t have uniformity necessarily in how many officials are at meets and how they’re positioned.

In that vein, we spoke with Brian Gordon, the Secretary of the NCAA Rules and the man in charge of overseeing the NCAA rules book, for the answer to many of the questions we’ve been getting about officials in light of the disparity between conferences. Our hope is that this will help to educate coaches who feel strongly about the matter in that they might express those feelings to their athletics directors as part of a positive conversation to align the rules (or the enforcement of the rules) across the country.