Fire Ed Hightower

True story from the Wisconsin-Northwestern game Saturday night:

A man was sitting behind us with several young boys. At one point, he says to one of the boys, "That's Ed Hightower, he's on of the best referees around."

Then, after one particularly emphatic call, in which Ed almost hit the poor Northwestern kid being whistled for the foul, the guy says "See how much he's waving his arms? That means it was an especially good call."

No, it wasn't a drunk college kid making these remarks tongue in cheek. The guy was serious.

(Thanks to my brother for catching these side conversations.)

Ed Hightower is a horrible referee, and Saturday night's game was a prime example why. Hightower and his cohorts, Dennis Bracco and Dan Chrisman -- who deserve at least as much blame as Eddie -- were the stars of the show for much of the game, which is precisely what refs should not be.

They called a piss-poor game, both ways. Both teams were on the short end of bad calls or non-calls. In the end, Northwestern made the plays it had to make to win, and we didn't.

But you have to wonder how the game might have been different if these bozos hadn't called 45 fouls. Or if they would have called Kevin Coble for traveling on one of his ridiculous prayers that happened to fall in. Or if they hadn't saddled Marcus Landry and Keaton Nankivil with fouls that were borderline at best.

What really bugs a Big Ten fan, though, is how Ed grabs the limelight on plays where nothing is really going on. On one play, after a dead ball, Hightower made a big show of bringing Jordan Taylor and Michael Thompson together to tell them to cool it ... when neither of them appeared to be doing anything remotely unsportsmanlike.

On another play, Hightower stopped the game to yell at Northwestern's Luka Mirkovic, clenching his fists together and pulling in opposite directions. What was he warning against? Swinging elbows? Overly aggressive screens? Mirkovic didn't seem to have done anything to warrant a lecture.

These are the times when Brent Musberger typically starts raving about Hightower.

After the Coble non-travel, I was 98% certain these idiots were going to tee up Bo, who has been on a roll with those lately. Thankfully they didn't, and if memory serves they probably made up for it with a terrible call against Northwestern quickly thereafter.

I imagine every conference has a ref or crew like this who fans of all teams shudder to see working their games. The Big Ten appears to be on an upswing again, and if it was serious about improving its product all the way around, it would find a way to replace guys like Hightower, Chrisman, and Bracco, and get competent refs in there.