At 9:38 AM 1/25/96, Scott Monaghan wrote:
>1. Mike, if penalties were not being called behind the play, perhaps the
>officials were not doing a good job of watching the whole play.  Now you have
>justified that and created a situation with two officials not watching the
>whole play. If the lines calls are screwed up,  are you going to add
>another linesman?
 
I wouldn't be in favor of that, but then again I had no reason to think of
it till now since I have not seen a problem with offsides and icing calls.
If it becomes an issue, I suppose we'd have to deal with it then.
 
I agree that officials were not doing a good job of seeing the entire play.
Dave Fischer seems to have taken the words out of my mouth by suggesting
that perhaps it is unrealistic nowadays to expect one referee to see
everything.  At least in HE, the two ref system has resulted in calls being
made that were not made before and should have been made.  Players know
those penalties will be called and they don't commit them now.
 
>3.  I have seen the two-official system.  I am not impressed.  I am least
>impressed with the fact that NOBODY seems to know from one minute to the next
>who's calling offsides, icing, dropping the puck and breaking up the tussles.
>In my opinion, it's chaos.  Yes, you can get two great officials and a great
>linesman working together.  That's likely for the BU-Maine game.  However,
>who's working the Lowell-Merrimack contest?
 
The funny thing is, since I see all of the Merrimack games, you'd probably
expect worse officiating in some of their games as opposed to BU-Maine or
whatever matchup gets the best officials assigned.  But that has rarely
been the case.  Either that, or I have become conditioned to worse
officiating. :-)
 
Mike Schafer added:
>I was in the CCHA for five years as a coach.  I experienced two and
>one ref systems.  The one ref system is by far the best because one person
>is in control of the flow of the game.
...
>Lastly the lines in ccha are called much
>better than everywhere else.  We played BU in hochey east MSU at munn and
>CC in Denver and the best officating by far was in the ccha.  Not better
>officals but better system.
 
It seems clear to me that the people best suited to evaluate the merits of
the system across all of college hockey are those who get to see it often
enough in all of the conferences.  WCHA people seem to be split on the
question; CCHA and ECAC people prefer the one ref system; HE people prefer
the two ref system.  I can only evaluate the system within HE because I
only get to see a handful of games at rinks outside the conference.  Scott
sees mostly CCHA games, and Mike sees ECAC and has seen the CCHA method.
 
If there is someone here who has seen a good number of games in HE and
either the CCHA or ECAC, I'd like to hear what his/her thoughts are.  I'd
also like to hear if anyone in HE believes things are worse in HE, since
the people who have spoken up from HE seem to like the system.
 
I questioned the move to two referees too when it was first made, because
of all of the reasons that have been mentioned here, but I was pleasantly
surprised at the way officiating in HE improved after the change.  For
whatever reason, it appears to work.  I didn't expect I'd be saying that.
 
---                                                                   ---
Mike Machnik                   [log in to unmask]            *HMM* 11/13/93
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