Every game can’t be pretty, especially with an inexperienced team, but they can’t all be this ugly either. Carolina survived an upset bid by a talented Stanford team despite some very sloppy play and extremely questionable officiating.
I am not one to bring up officiating in recaps very often because it’s usually a cop out for bad play, but Teddy Valentine and his fellow referees made an ugly game even worse. There were the garden variety questionable calls and quick whistles, but also phantom calls (flop warning on RJ? Did ANYONE see what that was about?), calls that were reviewed and still called wrong, and a complete disregard for anything that could be called tempo because of it.