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.

It’s pretty sad that I have to preface every soccer violence story with an, “at least nobody tried to kill them with grenades” thing, but here we are.

By way of Dirty Tackle comes this clip from a match between Baquedano and Pablo Lizama in Melipilla, Chile, wherein a ref stops play for roughing and fan interruptions and gets brutally beaten in a rough style by fans. At least nobody tried to kill him with a grenade.

The sad thing is that they probably DID try to kill him. They only succeeded in beating the ref and his assistant within an inch of their lives and removing half of their teeth (refer to the banner image for more details), but a former Baquedano coach talked to an English-language Chilean site about players have skipped a few steps of rational anger and moved straight-on into murder:

“Unfortunately, football has too many players like this. In Holland, an assistant referee was murdered by some young players. The surprising thing is that the only people who work at FIFA are mafia types and complete idiots. That works from the top down.”

Video if the incident is after the jump. It’s brutal, but thankfully you don’t get to see a lot of it, because when a crowd of people attacks somebody, really all you see is a crowd. Still though, viewer discretion is advised.

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Here’s an NFL ref taking a slow, harmless lob of a football to the face from Washington Redskins tight end Logan Paulsen and selling it like someone had just shot him in the face. Shake it off, buddy! (via Outside The Boxscore)

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An unsportsmanlike conduct call turned into for-real unsportsmanlike conduct during a game between the West Park Saints and Miramar Patriots in West Park, FL, on Saturday. I’ll let the US News set the stage:

After he threw the flag, [official Andrew] Keigans turned around an bumped one of the players and moved the player to the side to talk to one of the other referees, the report said.

The assistant coach, who disagreed with the penalty, barged the field and confronted Keigans as he was held back by head coach Antonio Lane, the report said.

Because the assistant coach left the sidelines and entered the field of play to confront Keigans, the head referee decided to end the game, the report said.

If you read that blockquote or looked at the picture at the top of the post (or skimmed and watched the video before you read this), you might’ve stood up in your computer chair, pointed at your screen and shouted “RACE THING!” This is normal.

It’s what most of the Internet is doing. One side points out that there were four refs, three black and one white, and the black assistant coach went sprinting-and-slapping at the lone white guy. One side points out that while prejudiced people attribute this to “typical savage behavior” (their words, not mine), there is a country full of white people (Canada) who go nuts and have bloody riots at pee-wee hockey games every day. Others still point out the arrival of RICK RO$$ as a peacekeeper in the clip, because that is hilarious.

The truth is that this fight is not about race. It’s about how stupid you are for letting a convicted felon coach your little league team. Turns out the guy doing the assaulting isn’t someone racist folks assume is a criminal, he’s an actual criminal. Whoops!

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Well, all of our complaining and cursing did it… just kidding. The NFL owners and Roger Goodell did it – they got the referees to agree to a new deal and come back to work for Thursday Night Football. It had nothing to do with ESPN announcers going nuts on Monday Night Football (something the network, of course, boldly proclaimed was the reason for the new deal) or TJ Lang’s Tweets blowing up or even the NFL offices receiving 70,000 phone calls from livid fans in the hours after the Seattle Seahawks may have been handed a win they didn’t deserve.

Nope, it was those brave owners and the hard-working commissioner who stuck it out and did what was in the best interest of their sport. They made sure that the refs didn’t get the few million dollars they were asking for from the league’s $10 billion in annual revenue. And even if the refs didn’t agree, those replacement fellas weren’t bad at all. Either way, make sure you thank your team’s owner when you see him or her. Just don’t touch him, you pathetic, lowly scum.

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Being an NFL replacement ref is easy, right? You just know a lot about football, learn what all the hand gestures mean and speak clearly into a microphone for what, ten seconds at a time?

Meet Don King, a guy who lucked into a scab position and should be BORN to talk, because his name is f**king “Don King”. Don had a little trouble spitting it out during the second quarter of Wednesday night’s Patriots-Giants preseason game, and if the embarrassment of having a stadium full of people boo you for being terrible isn’t enough, he’ll have the televised broadcast full of pro football players laughing at him to make it as bad as possible. Ugh, look at his poor mouth. It looks like an asshole.

Why was he so shaken up, you think? It could be because of this:

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