Made this post on 3/6/19 on the PSU board, and it still rings true…
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Over the weekend, after DJ Carstensen's no-call at the end of the PSU-Wisconsin, I read some comments on some of the PSU forums complaining about the fact that DJ has just done a game 500 miles away the night before. It wasn't surprising to me, since watching college hoops, you see the same guys popping up night after night on TV in different conferences. However, they usually at least seem to be in the same region (ie, guy might do some Big Ten, A10, Big East, etc).
Last night, I was watching the Utah State-Colorado State game and saw Kelly Pfeifer doing the game. Kelly does a lot of Big Ten games (he's had PSU twice this season), but this game was out at Colorado State. This got me to check and see what other conferences he's doing, and wowzers.
This basketball season is now 118 days old. In those 118 days, Kelly has worked 86 of them (note that KenPom shows 87 games, but he's got some bad data for one of them which I let Ken know about this morning). In those 86 games, he's done game in the following conferences (conference games only): Big Ten, Big Sky, Horizon, MAAC, Mountain West, MAC, Pac 12, Summit, and WCC. In 117 days, he's worked games in 25 different states from coast to coast.
Just looking at the past two weeks, he's gone: Ohio to Michigan to Kentucky to New Jersey to Maryland to Illinois to Indiana to California to Michigan to Indiana to Illinois to Montana to Colorado, working 12 games in 14 days.
I don't know what the solution is, but when people complain about the quality of officiating in college basketball, I think one of the symptoms is pretty obvious.