Even as college basketball officials go, Jim Burr is not particularly popular. He calls way too many games, like many of the big-name refs do, because NCAA officials are basically freelancers and you get rewarded for stretching yourself too thin. And he's disliked enough that he has an impostor on Twitter. If you're not following @JimBurr, well, you're missing out.
Burr officiated the USF-Georgetown game tonight. As usual, he felt compelled to make himself the star of the show. Normally he just calls dubious fouls from way off the ball, or signals threes from shots taken from the other side of the court, or issues random technicals to show everyone who's in charge here. Sometimes, though, he goes way over the top. Tonight was one of those times.
At the under-8 media timeout in the second half, Burr decided he'd had enough of a fan yelling at him and threw him out of the game. (Just to add some spice, this fan was sitting in a major donor's seats, although it was not the actual donor who was ejected.) We're hearing that Burr blew his whistle at the fan like he was going to T him up, and then had the guy escorted out of the Sun Dome. The fan tried to sneak back into the upper level (bless him for that), only to be quickly spotted and removed from the Dome again by two University Police officers.
But that's all ignoring the point, which is Jim Burr is so thin-skinned and full of himself that he threw a fan out of a basketball game. And it's not even the first time he's done it at a USF game -- Toro tells me that a few years ago Burr gave the gate to a fan who was there with his grade-school-aged son, and not even saying anything profane. The guy is a hothead and a menace, like Joey Crawford if Joey Crawford was also a bad referee. I can't wait to see how Jim Burr screws up the NCAA Tournament, because in college basketball, "ambitious" is often confused for "good" when it comes to picking officials.