Western Kentucky athletic director Todd Stewart was still not happy Thursday with the way things transpired Wednesday in Madison, Wisc.

He watched on television from Orlando, Fla., where WKU’s football team is preparing for the Cure Bowl, as freshman guard Marek Nelson was called for a foul with two seconds on the clock against Wisconsin. The play became highly-controversial and highly-confusing – and highly-important as Brad Davison made one of two free throws after that to give the Badgers an 81-80 win.

“The first thing I would say is that officials have a very difficult job do. They get it right far more times than they don’t, but I think the way that game ended (Wednesday) night was a disgrace. It really was,” Stewart said. “You want the game to be settled on the court. I think to have a foul called 90 feet from the basket with two seconds left? That’d be the equivalent to calling pass interference on a Hail Mary, calling it on a receiver that ball wasn’t even thrown too. That had nothing to do with the game.”

Nelson, guarding Brevin Pritzl who was trying to inbound the ball on the opposite end of the floor from the UW basket, ran into and plowed over Davison. Davison had sprinted to the end line and planted his feet in hopes of drawing contact with Nelson.

When official Steve McJunkins blew his whistle he signaled a blocking foul which Rick Stansbury interpreted as a foul on Davison. The second-year WKU coach was then livid when told the violation was on Nelson instead.

“I’m gonna say this as nice as I can – I’m not gonna put the blame on one play. But, as it turned out, it was an important play. It’s really an obvious play,” Stansbury said. “If (Davison’s) out of bounds, he’s an illegal screener. And he’s out of bounds. We’re supposed to go the monitor the last two minutes to look at things? To me that’s an important thing to be able to go to the monitor for. They said you couldn’t go. What else is more important to go to the monitor for late in a game? But it didn’t happen.

“If you watch the referee, the call he made, you see what he did didn’t you? He went to his hips. Block. You know what a block is don’t you? Who would have that foul been on? It’d been on Wisconsin.”

Ted Hillary, a veteran referee and now an NCAA regional supervisor of officials, was in attendance Wednesday and did communicate with both Stewart and Stansbury after the game.

“My own personal thoughts are a no-call would’ve been the right call,” Stewart said. “But, obviously, it was called differently – in fact, multiple times it was called emphatically that it was a block and then all of a sudden it wasn’t a block and it was a foul on (Nelson).

“I just hope that the Big Ten Conference comes out with a statement explaining exactly their view of what happened. Because I know what we’ve been told privately, and we’ll keep those comments private, but it’d be nice if they’d acknowledge what we’ve been told privately as well.”