During Clemson’s 17-12 win over Wake Forest on Saturday, the ACC officiating crew put together one of the worst performances I’ve seen from referees in quite some time.
Many factors made me feel this way, with one of the biggest being a seriously questionable roughing the passer call against Clemson star linebacker Jeremiah Trotter Jr.; visually, it looked like an embarrassing call. During Dabo Swinney’s weekly radio show Monday night, Swinney commented on the officiating when asked about the roughing the passer call.
“A tough call,” Swinney said. “I don’t know what you tell your linebacker… They made the call, but it is what it is.”
Things went a bit deeper than this, however, as the officials struggled all day with making the right call and doing it promptly. At times, it didn’t look like this crew even knew what they were doing.
If it weren’t for a false start penalty the play after Wake Forest quarterback Mitch Griffis illegally threw the ball to another Demon Deacon past the line of scrimmage, these officials would have made another critical mistake. Swinney touched on this during the show.
“Just like the play that, I mean, we thought the quarterback was across the line of scrimmage and a forward pass, and they ran another play, and it was a penalty, and then they come back, and they reviewed the play before the play,” Swinney said. “So, there’s some challenging things that come. Because my comment was okay, if they had thrown a touchdown pass, would we have called that off? Because the ball was snapped.”
“Certainly, nobody’s perfect, but there’s definitely a couple that I disagreed with for sure,” Swinney said. “But we’ll keep moving forward. Thankful we were able to win the game.”
The ACC needs to do a better job here. Swinney acknowledged that he likes the ACC’s Supervisor of Football Officials, Al Riveron, but he’s not going to call him or the ACC out on these things. In contrast, we will.
We need better officiating than what we saw on Saturday, not just for Clemson but for the entire conference’s sake.