Bye Weekends Mean Little News, But At Least We're Not Texas

Bye weeks are a horrible thing for many of our readers. We realize and understand that many of you only care about non-Wildcat things on a superficial level if at all; occasionally we'll even catch shade for posting something about another team at all. Sometimes even if it actually sort of relates to K-State. We're not saying this is a common thing, or that there's a large groundswell; we're just noting that we understand this is a K-State site, and some of you want K-State stuff all the time.

But bye weeks... well, everyone who covers the team sort of takes the weekend off. There's no game to cover, and most people with the inclination to write about one team on a daily basis are sports fans first. So they, like most of the staff here, spent Saturday watching other teams play football for 14 hours.

One of the things we saw: the most egregious case of WTFery imaginable in the Oklahoma State-Texas game. We'd like to be clear on two things here: one, yes, Texas has been the recipient of a lot of bad calls over time, and there's a certain amount of karmic retribution at play. But two, and this is even more important, Saturday's game was an absolute travesty. That many bad calls going against one team is rancid, like the stench of carp left to bake in the summer sun. Is Scipio Tex right? Is there actual corruption at play here? Or is this simply an utterly incompetent crew of officials? (The same crew worked the infamous Baylor-WVU game last season, and was also responsible for the ludicrous 13-minute stoppage of play in the K-State/UTEP game -- you remember, The Punt.)

We'll never know, and it would also be foolish of us to assume that this is merely a Big 12 problem. There are horrible officials in every conference, at every level. Even in the NFL. It's a hard job, and it's made exponentially harder by the fact that we're able to see instant slow-motion overhead replays in high definition while the poor saps on the field are required to make snap judgements at field level where their vision is potentially obscured by moving bodies. And then we rely on a replay system whose core philosophy is to err on the side fo the human beings on the field; if a play looks like X on replay but the officials called Y, the replay official can't rule X unless X is completely incontrovertible.

In essence, the replay system is like placing the official who made the call on trial: innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

But that's got nothing to do with Saturday, when several unreviewable calls simply materialized out of the ether. This wasn't one bad call turning the tide of a game. It was numerous bad calls, all going against one team, without even the pretense at offering any equally absurd make-up calls. It's easy to laugh at Texas and to say that they deserve it.

But that's how we get bad officiating in the first place. It doesn't matter who the victim is. This game needs to be reviewed by the Big 12 offices, statements need to be issued, and officials need to be reprimanded or worse. It was that bad, and all the "Haha Texas" in the world doesn't change that fact.