This is weird

Mark Cuban has a story on his website about how the NBA head of officiating, Ed T. Rush is leaving the job to become an assistant football coach at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. Here's a quote from the Huskies well-known kicker Garrett Bloom(?) on 'the new guy' spotted on the sidelines during a game last season:

"He looked familiar, but I had no idea who he was," Bloom admitted.

This spring, Rush has worked with Bloom as the Huskies’ new special teams coach. The West Chester University graduate and Hale’s close friend, has helped Bloom become more consistent this spring. "He got me to move my plant foot back about 6 inches," Bloom said. "It’s helped me become more consistent. I’m kicking it higher and farther and straighter. I used to hook it a lot."

Sweet. Not only does he know everything about NBA officiating, he's a special teams guru to boot! This is an interesting career change. But even though Rush is switching sports, I'm sure he must view it as a quality of life improvement -- especially given that he'll have to spend less time critiquing his employees performance and receiving critizism for his employees performance. Not only that, but he'll probably be able to operate in relative obscurity and do something he enjoys.

More importantly, whoever takes over for him as head of officials will hopefully re-implement the traveling violation. I saw more travels in 2003-2004 than I had seen in a lifetime of watching basketball.

Update: After watching the Pacers & Pistons last night, I think it's probably wise that Rush is changing careers. The game was officiated by what looked to be high school refs. It was awful. Charges underneath the basket, double-dribble calls that weren't double-dribbles and the always-popular phantom foul calls. The highlight however, was when ESPN's Jim Gray interviewed the Colts Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison during one of the timeouts and Peyton referred to Gray as "Dan." Nice.