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Archdeacon: Technical foul topped off UD's recent slide

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By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer 9:16 PM Saturday, March 13, 2010

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Jim Satalin lay awake much of the night.

“Honestly, I just couldn’t sleep last night,” the Atlantic 10’s Coordinator of Men’s Basketball Officials was saying Saturday afternoon, March 13, as he stood in a Boardwalk Hall passageway.

Some 19 hours earlier, Xavier University had come from 15 points down to edge Dayton 78-73 in an intense A-10 tournament quarterfinal that included a much-debated, now-bigger-than-life technical foul on UD’s Rob Lowery with 34 seconds left.

“I feel bad for Rob Lowery, who seems like a great kid,” Satalin said. “I feel for Brian Gregory. God, if I’m in that position, you’re fighting like crazy for a bid and everything else. And we all know what an incredible rivalry this is ...

“You just hate to see a fabulous game end like this.”

Satalin does understand what the Flyers are going through. Once a standout player at St. Bonaventure, he later was a successful coach for the Bonnies, then at Duquesne.

Now, because he oversees the A-10 officials, he’s had to sort through the game-ending controversy.

With 34 seconds left, Xavier led by two points. Lowery had the ball and called for a timeout. That’s when Xavier guard Terrell Holloway slapped at the ball, and Lowery responded by shoving him in the chest.

Referee Brent Hampton called a technical, and the other officials concurred. UD lost the ball, Hollway made the two free throws, then two more when he was fouled on the inbounds play, and that sealed the game.

Satalin said the call, procedure-wise, was correct: “Let me say right off, it wasn’t a punch. A closed fist constitutes a punch, and it wasn’t that. That’s why it wasn’t considered a fight and why (Lowery) wasn’t suspended.

“But the rules say that if an individual strikes an opponent with his hand, elbow, arm, foot or anything else in a confrontational manner, the act is excessive and should be ruled a flagrant technical.

“The referees were really put into a corner on this one. ... Everybody feels bad. It overshadows a great game.”

But just as it overshadows the good, it’s also eclipsed the bad.

While Lowery shouldered the blame, the Flyers shouldn’t have been in such a problematic situation.

In a recurring theme this season, the Flyers blew a big second-half lead. They led by 15 points with 10:37 left, but as they changed from transition basketball to a half-court offense, they didn’t score a basket for 15 straight possessions.

Unlike Xavier, which turned the end of the game over to Holloway and Jordan Crawford — who combined for 42 points — UD has no go-to guy in crunch time.

While the Flyers have the theatrical part of the game down pat — from their choreographed moves during pregame introductions to their highlight-reel, alley-oop dunks — they often come up short on fundamental basketball.

Although 20-12 is a good season for most teams, expectations were extremely high for Dayton this season, and that’s why the disappointment is so deep.

Last year, Lowery mentioned once how he’d like to end up on ESPN’s “SportsCenter.” On March 12, he did.

It wasn’t how he’d planned. Kind of like UD’s season.

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