Xavier-Butler: Reader Does Referees' Work For Them

Here's more on the great Xavier-Butler clock malfunction adventure. Reader Tim Burke emailed me in response to my previous post -- in brief summary, the game clock mysteriously stopped for a second near the end of the game, leading the referees to call the game over and sprint off the court to the furor of the Xavier bench.

As it turns out, a team of professional referees and thirteen minutes of deliberation are no match for some dude with a DVR:

I recorded the last minute or so of that game, so fortunately had the live video to break it down frame-by-frame (the way the refs ought to have) and figure out exactly how much time should have been taken off the clock. I used MPEG Streamclip, but any video editor that keeps the video in its native format could do it.

The clock was stopped on 14.7. It read 14.7 for exactly 45 NTSC frames (there are nominally 30 frames a second) meaning it took 1.5 seconds of real time for 0.1 seconds of clock time to elapse. Thus, 1.4 seconds should have been taken off the clock.

Put another way, the clock was inadvertently stopped for 42 NTSC frames (since 14.7 should have been visible for 3 NTSC frames) which is again 1.4 seconds.

Science has been dropped. If only the NCAA had upgraded their reel-to-reel sideline monitors, the refs might have been on the ball.