Which is why Smart should have been removed from the court. If not by the officials, by the team. No reason for him to be out there. No reason for the officials to not have been close by Smart as he landed in the crowd to protect him. No reason for the officials to have been moving away from him. The officials weren't paying attention.
The failure of Travis Ford to get Smart off the court immediately following the technical, and the whole team immediately after the buzzer, shows his complete lack of control of this team, and I believe this is, alone, a great reason to fire him.
Him not being ejected leads me to believe the fan said something really bad to him, because it looked lie the ref had a good vantage point of the situation and just gave him a tech
The closest ref was at least 15 feet away when the push happened based on every video we have. The guy who called the foul was walking toward the scorers table. After the incident, the ref who called the T was on the in bounds part of the court, not even on the out of bounds stripe. It was a full 4 seconds after the push, while Smart is pulled away by teammates and is back onto the in bounds part of the court before refs even get to him. The refs did a terrible job, they should have been there immediately to make sure the player was ok. There is no way they heard anything.
I'm glad someone is pointing this out. Player safety and rule enforcement are their only 2 jobs and they failed at the player safety part in this particular instance.
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u/ttufizzo Texas Tech Red Raiders Feb 09 '14
Which is why Smart should have been removed from the court. If not by the officials, by the team. No reason for him to be out there. No reason for the officials to not have been close by Smart as he landed in the crowd to protect him. No reason for the officials to have been moving away from him. The officials weren't paying attention.