Replay in College Hoops Was Already a Mess Before the National Title Game

1:24 remaining in the NCAA men's basketball national championship game: Everyone at Lucas Oil Stadium, and the millions watching at home, could see that Duke's Justise Winslow touched the ball last on a crucial out-of-bounds play that should have given Wisconsin the ball.

Instead, to the dismay of anyone who saw the obvious mistake, Duke was awarded the ball.

It's one thing to get a call wrong in real-time. Basketball happens fast, and in the Winslow scenario, it was nearly impossible to determine who the ball went out on. However, after a closer look, it was clear that Winslow was the last one to touch the ball.

But despite the call being so virtually ref-proof on replay, the refs did get that call wrong, giving the ball, and subsequently the national championship, to Duke.

The obvious, short-term question is how the hell did millions of people know the correct call, while the three people who mattered didn't. As it turns out, the refs weren't even in a position to make the right call:

"All four of our officials were involved in the review -- Jeff Clark was our standby," John Adams told SiriusXM College Sports Tuesday. "We never saw on our monitor what everybody saw at home, if you can believe that."

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"I saw it after they had left the monitor, and actually thought about: Is it in my prerogative to get up, run over the table, buzz the buzzer and tell them to come back and look?" Adams said. "That's how critical I thought the play was, and concluded that this is a job for the guys on the floor and I've never done this before, why would I do it tonight and perhaps change the balance of the game?"

"We had been told time and time again, 'Nobody at home will see anything you didn't see.' And I will tell you that's not what happened last night. That is not an excuse. That is just laying it out for you."

Replay has failed repeatedly throughout the season, and it has been most highly scrutinized for how long it takes to finish games that are filled with video reviews.

Refs are caught up in a struggle: get every call right, but don't take too long to make the call.

The problem comes when they take five minutes under the monitor and still can't make the correct call.

Monday's failure fell outside even the normal problems of replay. The referees simply didn't even look at every angle that was necessary to make the correct call. That is a fixable problem, and it's something that will certainly be addressed this offseason so that it never comes up again. But the problems with replay are deeper than that.

Unlike in other sports, college basketball referees are considered "amateurs" just like the athletes. They are not full-time, and thus, they aren't nearly as good as the referees in the NBA. As Mark Cuban so eloquently put it, "the referees couldn't manage a White Castle."

Beyond that general incompetency is an even bigger problem, especially when it comes to replay. The burden of proof of replay is so great—indisputable video evidence—that referees are often encouraged to make the wrong call just because they only have 99 percent proof of an overturn.

This strong burden of proof exists at all levels. There might be a clear catch-and-fumble in football, but if it is ruled incomplete on the field, it's tough to overturn. That means referees are strongly incentivized to stick with their original call even when that means they don't actually get the call right.

This is not a murder trial — this is a play in a college basketball game, and there is no need for such an absurdly high burden of proof. It is absurd that the rules in place encourage refs to make calls that they are 75 percent sure are wrong. This is supposedly a gift to the purists, an instance in which we defer to the referee's eyes, only using replay to confirm what they see. But sometimes replay sees what they don't see.

Replay is always going to have its detractors and it needs to be revised. There can't be three video reviews in the last two minutes of a game, especially on obvious, inconsequential calls.

But if the NCAA is going to have replay, it needs to at least put its refs in position to get those replay calls right, especially in the biggest game of the year, and especially when the call is as obvious as it was on Monday.