I think it's a combination of coaches having to "earn respect" from the refs and the fact that college referees are just not very good. Watching the ACC and SEC tournament games this weekend was painful. There were so many bad calls. GT absolutely did not lose the Clemson game due to officiating, we lost it due to poor offensive play down the stretch. But poor officiating certainly didn't help. The question that I would like to know is how do coaches earn these calls from officials? Coach K has always (at least as long as I can remember) gotten a lot of questionable calls from Duke, but he has never been one to cozy up to refs. He's on them from the start of the game. I would point to winning as a way to "earn" the respect, but despite going to the NCAA Championship Game in 2004, we never seemed to get 50/50 calls to go our way under Hewitt. And there were a few refs that were pretty trigger happy when it came to T-ing him up (Karl Hess in particular). Maybe it's more of a media thing. Once the media starts regarding you as a top quality coach the refs will (unconciously, hopefully) start to give you more calls. I saw a stat last season that since the early-2000s (or maybe mid-2000s, can't remember) GT has gotten fewer fouls called for us than our opponents average fouls against, and our opponents have gotten more fouls called for them than their average fouls for. I'm not sure if that is a product of our lack of aggressiveness driving the ball, our over-aggressiveness on defense, referee bias, or some combination. But it has been extremely frustrating over the last decade to just expect to come out on the short end of the stick with regards to fouls.
On a side note, my favorite ACC ref is Mike Eades. I think he does a good job most of the time, and one of my funnier basketball moments when I went to GT was courtesy of him. I can't recall the game, but it was an ACC game where I thought we were not getting any of the 50/50 calls. I was a part of Swarm and it was prior to McCamish, so I was standing on the baseline under the basket. Eades made a call in our favor, and when he walked over to the spot where the ball would be inbounded right in front of me, I said something like "that's the first good call you've made all night!" Most refs would've either ignored me or glared at me. Instead, he turned to me and simply said "thank you." I know he was being sarcastic, but I thought it was the perfect response. Anyway, I gained a lot of respect for him as a ref at that time.
