Atomic City Talk

It was a hard-fought game with some good plays by both teams... the only negative in the whole thing was the referee team. They couldn't have been referees -- and they didn't even stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

It wasn't one-sided IMO, just bad all the way around. At one point, Oak Ridge was on the McMinn 3 yardline or so, and after at least 10 minutes of officials conferring, OR was assessed a 15-yard penalty. They never even said what it was for, and no one seemed to know! My guess is that the officials added at least 30 minutes to the length of the game, if not more.

I think that McMinn Co. folks would concur. Can anything be done to keep these 4 from ruining games in the future?

I was at this match, and I could not agree more. The refereeing was sub par. I also found out that the Several of the officials were from Clinton. i hate to think that was the reason, but.........
However, they did call several penalties on McMinn Coaches for Unsportsmanlike conduct. I would have like to have heard what was being said.

Your A.D. can request they not be assigned to ORHS games in the future, just maybe not this year. I think a guy named Nick Varsalona does the assigning.

Thanks, Jacket. That's obviously Mike Mullins' call, not mine, but I'm tempted to ask if he's planning to make such a request.

Beware, the gestapo TSSAA is the final authority and they will let you know in no uncertain terms, their league, their ref's, their rules. They like to give schools what they don't want. Great way to treat dues paying members. I think the whole organization needs to be reviewed, not just six zebras that go loose one Friday night.

Well Said Sir!

Does the TSSAA typically have a hard time finding good referees, or are there plenty available? That might make a difference in how they respond. I suppose too, that more weight might be given to a complaint signed by both schools.

TSSAA ref's are trained in the rules and conferences on the field happen to assure everybody is on the same page. This is a judgement job and there are 7 guys to assure the rule call is applied correctly. They seldom change a call, complaints seldom cause a change in any outcome.

If a winner complains they don't respond and if a loser complains they chalk it to poor sportsmanship. They will review a tape and use that to evaluate the ref's. Remember though ref's are contract employees and paid by the home team from receipts.

The cheif complaint I have of TSSAA is they are non responsive to all members and pay more attention to the larger schools, and are not equitable when classifying in divisions. Main complaint is all private schools should be in a separate division.

I'm not looking to change the outcome, obviously, but it would be nice to avoid such a fiasco in the future. I speculated above that the folks from McMinn would probably share my opinion about the referees, and there have been several posts on CoachT.com affirming that. A review, and perhaps consideration of whether these officials erred in their handling of the game, is in order. They can't change what already happened, but they could prevent it from happening again.

I'm far from expert in athletic matters, so help me: are the division classifications not assigned based on the size of the school? The State keeps pretty detailed records on enrollment and ADM (average daily membership). However, since they're the only game in the state, it is disappointing that they don't consider all of their membership equally.

Both A.D.s could agree to submit the tape of the game to the home office of TSSAA and let them review it for performance evaluation. That is rather common.

They classify based on population as submitted by the member schools and cross check it with State numbers. The gripe comes in two forms. First, populations change yearly but classes change every four years. In between they can change a class if a population shifts about 20% in two years, not yearly. Also, populations are under reported using excuses such as this student goes to vocational half a day or they don't attend this school because of vocational schedules. Secondly the small rurals have a problem in the 1a class regarding private schools. Of late the privates have dominated this classification. In 2004 the final four consisted of three privates and a public. The championship is has been won at least the last four years by private schools with very good publics being beaten for the following reason. Privates are generally from a metropolitan area and draw from a six county area, and one even drew from Georgia. They thus had the ability to "recruit" some of the better players, this aint college ball. A small attempt to correct this problem was instituted two years ago by giving the privates a multiplier of 1.8 and multiplying that number to the population to move them up. It helped some but did not cure the problem.

The solution is to pull the privates out completely giving them their own division. Since the TSSAA is only about the money anyway I would also suggest that the championship in the public and private divisions would increase revenue. Then, if they really wanted to test things out have a superchampionship between the two seperate divisions and rake in the dough.