Scandalous!

The Rutgers women's basketball team must just be wondering who they pissed off in a previous life.

They played Tennessee tonight in a rematch of last year's national championship. I checked in on the game early on and Rutgers was down enough for me to think the game was over. I decided to check back in with about 4 minutes left and Rutgers had the lead. I was on the phone, so I had the game on mute while I talked. The Lady Vols hit two 3s in a row and Rutgers answered with a 2 so they had a 1 point lead with about 7 seconds left.

Tennessee took the ball down the court and put up 3 shots, none of which fell. It seems like time will expire when there's a whistle. The ref calls a foul in the scrum of a rebound. It looks like the Lady Vols will go to the line with .2 seconds left on the clock. Ouch!

But wait, they show the replay and it's clear that the clock freezes at .2 seconds. Multiple replays and slow-motions later, it's impossible not to note that the clock pauses for a few beats at .2 before running out. Of course, the foul is called during this pause.

The refs head to the replay, see that there are .2 seconds left when the whistle blows and award the free throws.

I don't know the rules of basketball at all, but it seems to me that there should have been something the refs could do there. They have replay. They see the same thing those of us watching saw and I don't see how they can't see that time should have expired.

So the girl hits her 2 free throws to put UT up by one. Rutgers heaves a pass, which is tipped and goes right out of bounds. The clock never starts, but the ref blows the whistle and says the game is over.

HOLY SHIT, DID RUTGERS GET THE SHAFT

You're telling me the ref has the ability to decide that those .2 seconds would have ticked off had the clock been properly started, but he doesn't have the ability to count and see that .2 was stuck on the clock for longer than it should have been? How contradictory is that?

This happened about 5 minutes ago, so no footage yet, but hopefully some will be YouTube'd shortly