Before I throw this out there, I need to make a few disclaimers:

Disclaimer No. 1 – I hate writing about officiating. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. I think it’s bad enough when fans obsess about it, but it's 10 times worse when media types write about it, because it just pours gasoline on the conspiracy fires. And at the end of the day, we all know that everyone thinks their team is the one getting hosed. Sometimes, they’re right. Most of the time, they’re not. Unfortunately, when you cover ACC football, the officiating has been so bad at times that it’s unavoidable.

Disclaimer No. 2 – I do not think the officiating was the main reason FSU lost Saturday's game against Clemson. If I was listing the biggest reasons, I’d point to another slow start, the defensive breakdowns early and late, the incredibly poor pass protection and the costly penalties that doomed drives. What those problems did was put FSU in the position where a few blown calls could help deliver the knockout blow.

Disclaimer No. 3 – No one at FSU (or anywhere) asked me to research or write what I’m about to present to you. I’m not sure anyone at FSU knows this information … although I’m willing to guess Jimbo Fisher has an inkling. (Which might explain why he appeared to lose his mind when that Dalvin Cook 45-yard run was called back in the fourth quarter).

Disclaimer No. 4 – I don’t think the ACC has a conspiracy against FSU football … I didn’t even think that when you had a referee moving the football during a first-down measurement (this really happened), when the holding calls were disproportionately called against FSU for years (this is documented), or when defensive players seemed to be getting ejected for questionable penalties on the regular.

Having said all that, I did see something intriguing on social media this weekend after Jimbo Fisher’s rant about the officials in the Clemson game. Someone mentioned that the field judge who made the poor call to bring back Dalvin Cook’s long run (among other questionable calls) was also the official who ejected Nigel Bradham from the Miami game in 2011.

Well, it doesn’t take much to pique my interest … especially when it comes to conspiracy theories. So I looked back at that game, and sure enough Field Judge Mike Cullin was indeed on the crew who handled the 2011 Miami game. As you likely remember, Bradham was ejected for launching his body into a defenseless receiver … although replays showed clearly that he didn’t launch his body at all. It was a perfectly legal hit, which the ACC later confirmed in a press release that week.

Now, I don’t know if Cullin was the official who threw the flag on Bradham -- it’s hard to tell on old YouTube television replays. But the fact that he was at least on that crew made me go a little further down the rabbit hole, and I think I found some interesting tidbits.

By checking through every box score since Jimbo Fisher became head coach, I looked for any game in which Jeff Heaser was the head referee -- as he was on Saturday -- and any game in which Cullin was on the officiating crew. Sometimes they were together, sometimes they were not. I honestly had no idea what I was looking for, I just figured it was worth examining.

Here is what I found:

I’ll start with Heaser. As far as I can tell, he’s only been a head referee with the ACC for a few years. He has called four Florida State games since 2014. In those four games, FSU has a 1-3 record.

With Heaser’s crew in charge, FSU lost to Clemson and North Carolina this year and the Seminoles lost to Georgia Tech last season. Their one win in those four games was a 20-17 victory over Boston College in 2014 -- Jameis Winston’s last season.

When you look at the penalty breakdown for those games, Florida State was the more penalized team in all four games -- but I don’t know if you can conclude anything from that. FSU is the third-most penalized team in the country right now, and it doesn’t seem to matter which crew is working the game. But since you’re probably curious, here is the breakdown for those games.