The ACC announced Tuesday that it was hitting Jeff Walz with a public reprimand and the University of Louisville with a $20,000 fine for comments Walz made about the officiating following U of L’s 73-72 loss at Syracuse on Sunday.
Here is the official release from the ACC office that was issued Tuesday afternoon:
“The Atlantic Coast Conference issued a public reprimand of Louisville women’s basketball coach Jeff Walz for violating the ACC Sportsmanship Policy following Louisville’s game against Syracuse on February 11. In addition, the league announced that an institutional fine has been issued to Louisville ($20,000) as a result of the violation. The funds from the imposed institutional fine will be placed into the Weaver-James-Corrigan-Swofford Postgraduate Scholarship account.
Walz’s postgame comments regarding the officials were in direct violation of the ACC Sportsmanship Policy that states: “Public criticism of officials or public comments evaluating the officiating of particular contests is not in the best interest of intercollegiate athletics. Individuals associated with the athletics program are prohibited, therefore, from commenting while acting in an official capacity on officiating other than directly to the Conference office.”
Walz took issue with an intentional foul call against Louisville’s Olivia Cochran that allowed Syracuse to sink the game-winning free-throws with just 2.7 seconds left to play. The loss kept the Cardinals from a win that would have had them tied with Virginia Tech atop the ACC standings.
“It was a God-awful call,” Walz said. “It was terrible officiating. They should be embarrassed. But you know, I’ll get my fine. I’m sure I’ll get a letter of reprimand. But at this point, somebody has to start holding the officials accountable. That call was the worst call I’ve seen in my 29 years of coaching. If we’re going to start calling that, every foul at the end of a game when a team has to foul, it’s intentional. Every foul is. We all know it is. But to call it in a one-point game with 2.5 seconds left, it’s just awful. It’s atrocious. It’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing for our league. But we’ll never hear anything about it because it’s such a sacred society that we can’t ever reprimand publicly an official, God forbid. But we’ll reprimand coaches and players will be called out. But there’s three people out there, God forbid, if we came out and we actually said a league made a statement that it was a blown call, a bad call. We won’t do that.”
Worth it.
