Editor's Note: Ryan Marks is the head coach at Division I independent Texas-Pan American and is chronicling his season for ESPN The Magazine. In his latest dispatch, he calls foul on those who give officials a hard time.

When we played St. John’s in Queens on Dec. 21, just over a year had passed since my last technical foul. So I commemorated this career-best streak with a black-and-white cookie at the world-famous Junior’s in Brooklyn. After all, what better way to acknowledge the work of my colleagues in stripes than to pay homage to Seinfeld’s “look to the cookie.” It’s the perfect metaphor for better coach/referee harmony.

Sure, in my 11 years as head coach, I was once guilty of being cantankerous and sarcastic on the sideline -- my season high is eight T’s -- but I’ve developed sympathy for the devil. For starters, the way officials are deployed to games is simply archaic. Referees are not employees of the NCAA but rather subcontractors who are assigned by multiple bosses to multiple conferences.

As a result, a ref working small leagues such as ours can cycle through roughly 30 sidekicks in a season, creating a frustrating lack of consistency. The block one ref sees on our end can be a charge to the opposite official on the other end.

Refs are also saddled by the NCAA with an absurd amount of game-management minutiae: monitor illegal logos on socks, hurry teams out of timeouts and decide if undershirts and arm sleeves are of legal length. How about just calling a walk?

With the speed, size and skill of D1 players these days -- some of whom are self-proclaimed “gangstas” -- maintaining on-court order is an arduous task for officials, especially during a rivalry like Xavier-Cincinnati. When games go from heated to highly flammable, it’s easy to insinuate that the zebras should have stepped in sooner. But the responsibility falls on us, not officials, to teach young men how to play with dignity under duress -- and to have the fortitude to sit them until they learn.

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