Editor’s Note: As Illinois basketball is currently back in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, we now update, revise and augment this article from May of 2013.
Illinois basketball has beaten a higher seeded team in the NCAA Tournament just twice in school history. However, they came extremely close to doing it a third time this past March.
The #7 seed Illini trailed #2 seed Miami 57-55 with 40 seconds remaining when an extremely controversial play transpired.
Replays clearly showed THAT the Illini should have maintained possession on an out-of-bounds call that went against them.
The ball was wrongly awarded to the Miami Hurricanes, and it was so obvious that even a Miami player admitted it.
Was told Miami’s Julian Gamble said in the locker room that the ball went off teammate Kenny Kadji on the blown call. Looked like it.
โ Shannon Ryan (@sryantribune) March 25, 2013
Now the NCAA is going to going to make sure this type of thing doesn’t happen again.
And here’s some news about how that’s going to change in the future.
The 12-person committee had 11 members present and voted on changing the replay rules, as well as adjusting the elbow-clearing rule and block/charge clarification.
Pending approval from the Playing Rules Oversight Panel, which will meet on a conference call on June 18, these rules will go into effect for the 2013-14 season.
[Rules committee chair John] Dunne said there was a lengthy discussion to allow officials to go to the monitor in the final two minutes of regulation and overtime to determine who should retain possession for a play out of bounds. The original proposal was for the last minute.
“We felt that two minutes was better than one minute,” Dunne said. “Obviously, a possession with 1:10 left is just as important as one with just under a minute left.” (h/t Champaign Room)
Illini head coach John Groce responded to a question about the critical in-bounds call at the postgame press conference:
“You saw the same video that I did,” he said.
“Those guys did a good job though. They did. It’s a hard game to officiate, it’s both teams physical, both teams desiring the same thing. 50/50 calls are hard sometimes.
“That’s how he saw the play in life speed, and certainly respect him and respect the call that he made.”
Groce took the high road, but on Twitter, just about everyone watching the game on television tweeted that it should have been Illinois basketball.
Had the call been correct, maybe the Illinois basketball program would have finished the game off and claimed their third ever tourney win over a higher seed.
The Illini were a #5 seed when crushing the #4 seed Cincinnati Bearcats in 2004 (a moment chronicled on MTV’s reality show The Newlyweds, as Mr. Jessica Simpson, Nick Lachey, is a huge Cincy fan) andย as a #9 over a #8 UNLV in ’11.
Illinois basketball is now 1-8 vs Top-2 seeds (only win: 1989 vs Syracuse when Illinois was a No. 1 seed). This rule change is already being come to known as “the Illini rule” or the “Illinois Rule.”
Most teams have lots of fans who believe that the officials are always against them. Illinois is in rarified air though in that they truly have been on the wrong side of a call that was so egregious it led to a rule change.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. Heโs also the author of โTransatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,โ and โNo, I Canโt Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.โ
He currently contributes to USA Todayโs NFL Wires Network, the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America and RG. His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Washington Post and ESPN. You can follow him on Linked In and Twitter.
