Around 3:05pm on Saturday afternoon – deep in the the second half of the ACC Tournament semi-final game that saw significant national criticism befall the Atlantic Coast Conference officiating crew who called 42 phenomenally inconsistent fouls – I got a couple of strange tweets come through our SFN Timeline.

Someone had re-tweeted a tweet from @adam_smithTN that said, “Gottfried: “That’s a charge!” Ref Brian Dorsey: “Shut your #$%^&& ass up!”

Initially, I thought it was someone (who I don’t know) crafting a figurative allegory about Dorsey’s awful officiating at the time. Obviously, no professional official would ever talk that way to any coach — particularly a group of officials mired in a controversy that saw them publicly supporting Karl Hess in his recent dust up with Mark Gottfried’s NC State University by wearing taped ‘KH’ on their shoes in the opening round of the ACC Tournament (Link to story). And, particularly not Dorsey, who was an official on Hess’ crew that called the controversial game in the RBC Center when Chris Corchiani & Tom Gugliotta were ejected.

So, I asked if this was a real tweet or not in the SFN Twitter timeline (that was ON FIRE TODAY, by the way)?

When I did, 99.9 FM’s Joe Ovies quickly responded, “Yup, that just happened. RT @adam_smithTN Gottfried: â€œThatâ€™s a charge!â€ Ref Brian Dorsey: â€œShut your #$%^&& ass up!â€â€

Then I checked out this Adam Smith guy and learned that he is actually a member of the sports media out of Burlington for the Times-News.

So, this gives us TWO eye-witness reports from actual media members on press row that corroborate that an ACC referee taunted, disrespected and degraded NC State’s basketball coach in the middle of a phenomenally controversial game.

Let that sit for a moment.

Really…think about that for a while.

HOLY ****!!!! (forgive us for a moment…as SFN does NOT use the kind of language that ACC officials are allowed to use).

What is one to say about this level of negative bias, vitriol and outwardly aggressive animosity from a supposed ‘unbiased’ official whose judgement and whistle LITERALLY get to decide the outcome of the game?

I am genuinely too upset and wired to construct any kind of analysis or response at the moment. I will simply start by asking if anyone has ever heard an official say something similar to Dean Smith, Coach K, Roy Williams, or ANY other college basketball coach?

Oh my…could you IMAGINE if an official had said such a thing to Gary Williams? Do you think he would have lived to see the next whistle?

For decades, all but two of the Atlantic Coast Conference institutions have almost uniformly acknowledged that the conference has a major problem with officiating incompetence and double standards. Maybe some of the ‘good’ news about yet ANOTHER public implosion of John Swofford and John Clougherty’s officiating cabal will be some change is on the way. If not, we deserve to blame ourselves if we don’t do anything other than sit around the same lazy, old-boy environment that the ACC has created.

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