Sean Miller at a game next season.

It might be time for Pac-12 men’s basketball coordinator of officials Ed Rush to do the noble thing and retire. After all, he’s north of 70 and officiating basketball games is a younger man’s job these days. Especially when this specific old man is apparently offering other refs $5,000 to make sure certain coaches are ejected. At least that’s what Rush is being accused of in a new report by Jeff Goodman of CBS Sports.

According to anonymous Pac-12 basketball officials, Rush has a personal vendetta against Arizona Wildcats coach Sean Miller, enough so that he attempted to bribe and “bully” his fellow officials.

Rush, according to a source within the Pac-12 officiating group, told a group of referees on the Thursday of the Pac-12 tournament in Las Vegas that he would give them $5,000 or a trip to Cancun if they either “rang him up” or “ran him,” meaning hit Miller with a technical or toss him out of the game. Rush then reiterated during a Friday morning meeting, according to one referee in attendance, that officials should take similar action against Miller if he did anything on Friday in the Pac-12 semifinals against UCLA.

“He was emphatic about not dealing with him (Miller),” the ref told CBSSports.com. “He made that perfectly clear.”

In that meeting was referee Michael Irving, who called a technical on Miller in the Pac-12 semifinals later that evening. Miller swore that he never directed any profanities at the officiating crew, but he earned the T and a $25,000 fine for confronting an official after the Cats lost to UCLA by 2 points.

As a result, Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott brushed Rush’s $5,000 bounty off as a joke and slapped him on the wrist. Because if we know anything to be true, it’s that simply telling a guy to stop being mean to someone will certainly make him stop. Clearly, Arizona basketball fans have nothing to worry about next season. Right, giraffe?

Meanwhile, this is also bad news for the NBA, because up until 2003 Rush was the league’s director of officiating, and there are plenty of fans out there who still haven’t moved on from the Tim Donaghy scandal. While Donaghy’s “indiscretions” took place in 2006 and 2007, there are people who think that the problem goes way back and even still exists to this day. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t still have videos like this popping up every week.

In conclusion, Ed Rush is about 15 years late for his appointment with a 4:30 dinner and the weekend shuffleboard tournament at Shady Pines.

In case you weren’t watching, Louisville Cardinals sophomore guard Kevin Ware suffered a pretty awful injury when he broke his leg during yesterday’s win over the Duke Blue Devils. In any game, Ware’s broken leg would have caused basketball fans to cringe, his teammates to reportedly faint and vomit and his coach to turn white in the face, but since this was the Elite 8 of the NCAA Tournament, it seemed like Ware’s injury was magnified x10000000.

A few things happened in the aftermath of the injury. Some fans watched in horror, as some fans reportedly started a “Let’s go Duke” chant. Some of our peers declared that they wouldn’t post videos or GIFs of the injury out of respect, while others jumped right on it. One sports writer used Ware’s injury to milk a few last drops of traffic out of an old article, while others made fun of him. And some a-holes started Kevin Ware parody Twitter accounts, while other people were just normal human beings and not sociopathic douchebags.

So today I make this plea to Twitter – stop letting bullsh*t accounts like @KevinWare_5 happen.

UPDATE: Twitter suspended the account. Swift mutha-f*ckin justice, With Leather style.

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The NCCA Tournament is down to its Final Four: Michigan, Syracuse, Louisville And Wichita State.

If you’re like me, your bracket looks … horrible. Just horrible. I thought Ohio State was going all the way, but what do I know? I also thought NC State was going to do well. What’s wrong with me?

The good news is that the folks at Chips Ahoy! are working hard to make sure I feel better about my tournament performance in two important ways: 1) by scouring college campuses across the country to find the “sweetest bracket” and creating a bunch of endearing fan videos along the way, and 2) sending With Leather a gigantic box of Chips Ahoy! cookies. So now I get to see the side of the NCAA tournament that isn’t “HERE’S A THOUSAND HD PICTURES OF A BROKEN LEG,” and everybody I know gets a free bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cookies. Maybe I should send a few of them to the guys at NC State.

Anyway, ChipsAhoy.TV is adorable. After the jump I included clips from the teams who are still in it (because these people are the ones you should be listening to), but they’re all pretty great, so check them out.

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“I’m tired of doing all this stuff for free. And this is where you make your money, the NCAA tournament.”

Those were the words that Ole Miss star guard Marshall Henderson uttered early on in the 2012-23 NCAA Tournament, leading many to believe that the brash, showboating junior SG from Hurst, Texas was calling his college career quits after this year and declaring himself eligible for the NBA Draft. Well, apparently that wasn’t true, and it just further proved that Henderson is full of words. Granted, he’s also full of talent, but NBA-ready talent? That’s up for debate.

Not up for debate is the fact that Henderson is widely loathed by pretty much every fan that doesn’t wear Ole Miss gear, and if he is indeed returning to the SEC Champion Rebels for his senior season, then he’s going to have a colossal bull’s eye on his back. You know, more colossal than the one he knows he already has.

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I don’t have a lot of reasons for this to exist, other than March Madness happening and everybody in the world doing a March Madness thing. Here, I’ll let them explain it:

Our officially unofficial video about a month-that-rhymes-with-starch insanity featuring building block men playing games of round hoops. #NoBollocks

That … didn’t help.

Anyway, this is exactly the way to spend a few minutes on a Friday afternoon. Not-especially-well animated Lego guys recreate classic basketball moments, but not really, because the team names and players are all wrong, like they ran the script through a translator and back again, so Christian Laettner becomes “Christina,” UNC becomes the Carolina Dirty Feet, and so on. The best part is either the scathing condemnation of Chris Webber’s life, which is still totally deserved, or the incredibly morose ending, which fits neither a Lego basketball video nor a beer commercial. So … congratulations on making this awesome thing, weirdos.

My evening unfolded almost exactly as I predicted last night, from the bunny playing piano to the cat tipping his hat, but how I handled that much LSD in one night is still a mystery to me. Regardless, our brackets are filled out and the games are about to begin, so I figured we could run down today’s schedule with the help of the wonderful ladies at Playboy, who, when not being shunned from society by Darren Rovell, are actually quite the NCAA Tournament experts in their own rights.

Okay, maybe I’m using the term “experts” a little loosely, but I’m still pretty impressed that these women could take the time out of their busy schedules of ignoring me to compete against each other in the 2013 Playboy Bracket Challenge. Fans and bros were able to fill out their brackets on the (obviously not-necessarily-SFW website) and compete against some of their favorite Playmates, including Kari Nautique, Nikki Leigh, the wonderful Chloe Miranda, and recent mom Jaime Edmondson, among others.

The biggest missing piece, though, is Ciara Price, but I think the restraining order may just completely block her from my computer. Haha, she’s such a kidder. Anyway, today’s remaining schedule is after the jump, as well as some special Playboy NCAA Tournament cards featuring Nikki Leigh, and serve no purpose other than to make me like Ohio State and Florida for once.

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