With the sports world buzzing over the NBA's gambling scandal involving a referee, the commissioner for the Atlantic Coast Conference has come out to say that they've been performing background checks on their officials since the last school year. Commish John Swofford:
"It's not a catchall, end-all by any means, but it does show a proactive way of looking at this and hopefully raising red flags if there are any to be raised."
"There wasn't anything that we saw that concerned us, that stimulated our belief that we should take this route," Swofford said. "But this whole issue of gambling is so prevalent in our society. ... We just simply want to do everything we can proactively to have that kind of integrity in our officials as well as our student-athletes."
The ACC is primarily doing this with their football and basketball [both men's and women's] officials. According to Swofford, the ACC and Big Ten are the only leagues to do these checks ... though more could follow suit in the wake of the NBA's problems. The domino effect of this could be mistrust in all officiating, especially in basketball. According to the article, the league has been looking into "any ties to gambling on sports, officials' credit histories and criminal and driving records at the local, state and federal levels."
Most long-time ACC fans know the snide remarks of officials favoring the "Big Four schools" [UNC, Duke, NC State, Wake Forest] ... with Duke, specifically, being targeted as a program that gets beneficial calls.
