there are multiple possible explanations. Central to all of them is the fact that a huge percentage of basketball calls are highly subjective. Blocks and charges are often 50/50, technicals are often called on a ref's whim to Assert His Authori-tay, and so forth. I preface the below by saying: My belief is that the officiating profession is, like most professions, staffed with professionals who care about doing their jobs well and are doing their best to do so. I do not believe that cases 3-5 below are widespread (but they do happen). I think the second case is inherent and somewhat unavoidable in life. And the first even moreso.

- The first, and most common, is that officiating most sports involves a lot of fast, subjective decision-making. This is especially true of basketball (maybe most of all sports) bc it involves constant close contact between players often in clusters that make it difficult to see what actually happened with the naked eye making it necessary to make calls based on patterns, experience and even physical reactions. Some refs struggle more than others with seeing the action cleanly. When this is what's going on you're usually going to see bad calls, but generally going in both directions.

- The second is subconscious preference. Maybe you grew up in New England, your great great grandpa got bayoneted in the nuts by Jackson's infantry at Bull Run, had crippling ED for the rest of his life, and your whole family harbors a deep hatred of the South. So when you're assigned to officiate U Conn vs Bama you reflexively shade your calls to favor U Conn. Maybe you're an evangelical Christian who was raised to despise Catholicism so when you call Notre Dame vs Liberty it's really against your nature to award subjective calls to the papists. People who think this sort of thing doesn't happen at times are naive. People who think it happens all the time are paranoid. (On the global stage: there are 100% officials from some other places who hate America where this and the next one apply).

- The third is conscious preference. It could be factors like those above but you, in your heart, REALLY hate Notre Dame. In fact, on top of everything else, they broke your Texas-loving child's heart when they beat the Longhorns for the 1977 football national championship and while don't tell anyone this publicly, you relish the chance to stick it to them and you know very well that in the deep arts of subjective officiating you can do that in a variety of ways. Refs are human. They were fans before they were refs.

- The fourth is conscious AND motivated preference. You know where your bread is buttered, where your paychecks come from, and while you're going to maintain an outward appearance of integrity, you're a PAC ref and you know it's incredibly important to the PAC for Team A to beat Team B so that Team A stays in the top five and in the national playoff conversation. So that PI or that hold or that roughing call you probably wouldn't normally call is gonna get flagged (and a few you'd normally flag go uncalled), because you're a company guy and you want your company to get paid that Playoff money. Anyone would be silly to think that the years of criminally bad PAC reffing favoritism we saw were just cases of good faith officiating gone wrong.

- The fifth is the most rare and the most paranoid - but we know it's happened plenty in the past and we would be completely stupid to think it ISN'T happening now that full tilt gambling is not just legalized but celebrated as an integral part of the sporting landscape - is money or material incentives changing hands. Refs are simply not PAID enough to not be prone to this kind of temptation when there is so much cash sloshing around, especially now that there are so many practically untrackable ways to pay people. Plenty of scum will betray their country to a foreign enemy for $100K, so we'd be silly to think that some refs with a mortgage wouldn't listen to an offer of $100K to shade all the subjective calls in a game to one side to help a certain outcome.

Thus concludes my contribution to this very important discussion: If your name is John Wilkes Booth VI you might harbor some motivation to favor Georgia over Wisconsin.