Greg Gard expresses frustrations over inconsistency with officiating

Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard was frustrated with the officials after his Badgers squad topped Iowa, 64-52 on Wednesday night. While he had been rankled by a few specific calls during the game, his general ire stemmed more from a lack of inconsistency.

After the game, Gard explained his troubles with game-to-game and even possession-to-possession differences in how the game is called. Largely, it’s because it makes it hard to tell his players what is and isn’t allowable.

“Because No. 1, it impacts the players. And they don’t know. They’re — ‘What is a charge? What’s not?’ — so they ask me and I don’t know, because it’s one thing on one end, something else on the other. I have great respect for the guys that are officiating. It’s a really hard job. Guys are big, strong, physical. It’s fast. It’s not as easy as it looks when you watch it on TV when you can push rewind and DVR it and pause it. They have to make an in-game, real-time decision. But that’s something that I think our league is trying to help guys get better and improve in all those areas,” Gard said.

Gard, amidst his critique, made sure to reinforce that he understands the difficulties of officiating.

Even still, he’s clearly not going to let the inconsistencies he’s noticing — particularly a lack of standard expectations for calls in the post — abide.

“And they do a ton of games and they’re in different places and these guys had to travel through rough weather tonight, too. I think the biggest thing we’re trying to get to, or place we’re trying to get to is consistency. Specifically in low post play. And it’s – between how they instruct us that it’s going to be called, videos we get, how it is called — it varies,” Gard said.