What exactly are the alternatives? Get the crew that called the travesty at the end of the Miami-Duke game last year? Bring back Ron Cherry's crew? Borrow officials from other conferences that all insist their officials are the worst?

Every game thread and every post-game thread has multiple discussions and tirades about how the refs decided the outcome of the game, how the officiating was terrible, how inconsistently the game is called, how Team A got beat by the refs and not Team B, etc.

I don't know if officiating has gotten worse in recent years, if the increasing speed and physicality of athletes is making it harder to call, if the increasing emphasis on replays and reviews has made us more cognizant of officiating, or if it's always been bad and we just notice more now with 30 different camera angles and huge HD TVs. But whatever the reason, it's abundantly clear that no one is figuring out how to "fix their reffing situation" and the best we can hope for most of the time is for the badness to hopefully get spread evenly between both teams.

So while I'm all for criticizing the ACC for fining coaching that are frankly addressing what everyone wants to hear them address, but it's hard to criticize the ACC for not simply "fixing" an issue that is apparently plaguing every aspect of the game (including at the professional level if /r/nfl is to be believed--I think I saw 4 different post-game threads today alone declaring that the terrible refs gave the game away).