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Respectfully, the technical foul on Mo Dioubate was the worst call in the history of sport

Drew Franklinby: Drew Franklin02/01/26DrewFranklinKSR

Archaeologists have uncovered traces of sport dating back to Ancient Egypt. Let’s call it around 3000 B.C., when wrestlers grappled in the sand while scribes etched their battles onto tomb walls. Many years later, the Olympic Games were held in Ancient Greece, where competitions were as simple as running the fastest or jumping the farthest. Empires have fallen to these trivial games in their earliest days, and in more recent times, Super Bowls have been won and lost on the goal line.

It’s the sacred timeline of human competition. More than 5,000 years of champions and heartbreak. Gods. Kings. Gladiators. Legends. Millennia of them. Superhuman performances on the grandest stages.

And on Saturday night in Fayetteville, all of those years of sport hit their lowest moment when Mo Dioubate was given a technical foul for… well, historians are still working on that part.

It’s unclear why Dioubate was T’d up. We may never know. But what is clear is that it should be etched into present-day storytelling as the most inexplicable, unfathomable, what-are-you-looking-at whistle since before the invention of the whistle, or even the ball.

May we never see the moral fabric of athletics fall this far again.

Arkansas made both free throws to cut into the Wildcats’ second-half lead, then Kentucky was called for another technical foul 20 seconds later, as Roman gods cried into their immortal hands, wondering how such a call could be made with the score that close, in a game of that magnitude.

Thankfully, it held no bearing on the outcome.

Mark Pope talked about the technicals.

Reactions to Doug Shows calling the tech on Dioubate

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2026-06-07