When the official score is wrong

Oh tiny college sports, you make me so crazy.

Official who has the call clearly signals a 3-pointer made but the official scorer puts it up as two and there's no correction. Do you go with the score on the board and on the stats or the score that's, you know, correct?

 

Or, how about when they attribute the scoring to the wrong player. That happens far too many times as well.

 

From the DMN thread, and the looming boss that is yours from advertising, call and ask them which score would bring in a few more dollars...does one team attract more subscribers, is there a player whose parents are huge advertisers. Accuracy? Ethics? It won't matter.

 

Scoreboard operator should always defer to whatever the official stats are. If there's a question, they can check with the referees during a stoppage to see who called what.

I've been in many halftime/postgame conversations with the official scorekeeper, the other reporter, a radio guy or two, both benches' scorebook/stat keepers and the people keeping the running PBP for the official stats trying to figure out where an error crept in. These things can be worked out.

 

Depends on whether it helps or hurts the team you want to win.

 

The official book is the official book. If it says 85, and it's 86, it's 85.

I would feel very uneasy if the official book used an eraser.

 

I've seen it many times. There's a reason they use pencil rather than pen.

 

Always use the official book, even when you know it's wrong. There's been times when I've wanted to say that something's wrong, but all we're doing is reporting the event, not trying to alter it.

 

But I don't want to lie about what I saw either. So when the official scoring differs from what I know to be true, I say things like the scoring "was credited to Joe Blow." Then I can sleep at night.

 

Always go by the official book. It's frustrating, I know, but there's a reason they're the "official" book. Plus, there's nothing wrong with bringing up the difference and seeing what they say, or if the other bookkeeper had the same thing.

 

But isn't reporting the event reporting what actually happened, as opposed to the (incorrect) official version?

That's where I get stuck on it. Some statistics are a matter of interpretation and can legitimately been seen several different ways. But the score is the score, and having the box say a team scored 55 doesn't mean that's what happened if they actually scored 56.

I would feel differently if the officials said an obvious 3 was a 2. That's part of the built in human error factor, like a bad foul call. But scorers don't make judgment calls on scores. It's not like they can decide if it's a 2 or a 3. It was a clearly (and ruled by the officials) a 3 and simply recorded incorrectly.

In this particular case, the mistake was brought up and the scorekeeper said something to the effect of, "We knew something was wrong but we didn't want to bother the refs so what we have is what's official." It frustrated me.

 

Report that there was a discrepancy if you want. But the official score is the official score, period.

You can no more report the 'correct' score in this situation than you could report that the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in 1972.

Consider the extreme of the situation: If the score was 85-85, and you knew it was really 86-85, but the book didn't reflect that, would you not report that it went to overtime?

Of course not. You would report the discrepancy, and then report the overtime.

Same here.