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.

Bill Walton (R) with UPROXX's own Vince Mancini

Yesterday, Deadspin reported that ESPN’s golden child and father of Grantland, Bill Simmons, had been unusually silent on Twitter for the past two days, and it turned out that the Worldwide Leader has placed a gag order on him after he criticized First Take’s horrible debate segment between Skip Bayless and Seattle Seahawks DB Richard Sherman. Simmons was arguably correct in saying that the whole thing was embarrassing for everyone involved, but that didn’t stop ESPN from laying the hammer of internal justice upon its most celebrated employee.

The reaction was interesting, in that a lot of people who haven’t liked Simmons for years were all like, “Oh snap, original Sports Guy back???” But I’m going to try to put the basic thought process into terms that Simmons fans might better understand. You know when your best friend starts dating a really hot girl but there’s more than meets the eye to her – like when Valerie Malone showed up on 90210 and started dating, well, everyone, right? – and when there’s finally a struggle between the two, you hope that your friend is going to see the light and dump her sorry ass. But then even when she leaves, he replaces her with Gina Kincaid and you’re like, “This guy just won’t ever learn.”

That’s what I took away from the bulk of reaction to Simmons’ hush-hush yesterday. But you want to know how Bill Walton took it? He took it as, “F*ck it, bros, I’mma say whatever the f*ck I want!”

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The modus operandi for people running football in 2011 has been to unnecessarily micro-manage it from the minutia up, so it should come as little-to-no surprise that a new guy brought in to be the officiating consultant of the Pac-12 is the stuffed-shirt dean from any number of teen sex comedies and wants to make sure nobody has a good time at the football games. NCAA rule violations? Let’s just sweep that sort of important thing under the rug under the “board of trustees” (or whatever) leaves. But hand gestures? Hand gestures?

From Sorry Bro Sports:

New Pac-12 coordinator of officiating Mike Pereira says the Ducks signature ‘O’ shape the players occasionally make with their hands after a touchdown, “borderlines on unsportsmanlike conduct.”

Seriously, look at this guy. I don’t want to boil down the “what does and doesn’t constitute sportsmanlike conduct” debate to “lol what a nerd”, but come on, has this guy ever had a day of fun in his whole life? He could be on our currency. He’s the kind of guy who looks at professional sports and decides that “the O hand gesture looks more like a triangle than an O” is the first thing you should fix.

“Slippery slope” is an even worse talking point, but if we take away school spirit hand gestures and the ability to choose the color of your shoes, what’s next? Taking the logos off the helmets, because supporting your team is “bragging”? Should we limit the school fight songs to one long monotonous note, held for 8-10 seconds before the start of the game, but before any of the fans (or “persons”) have arrived?

Come on, Mike, don’t be such a square. Let them make circles.