Time to blow whistle on risky referee business?

The referee hopped the plane headed for the Caribbean, swimming trunks packed with his whistle for three days of fun-in-the-sun disguised as work. His five-star hotel was gorgeous -- complete with waves crashing into the beach just outside his window.

And as he sat in the hot tub enjoying fruity drinks at the all-inclusive resort, he thought to himself he was really living nice, officiating one exhibition per day for the college team with which he made the NCAA-allowed foreign trip.

The best part?

The referee didn't pay for a thing.

The university footed the entire bill.

And isn't this an obvious conflict of interest?

"Yeah, probably," said one college coach who recently took two officials on a foreign trip but declined to speak on the record about the subject. "I could see why it might be a conflict of interest. But everybody does it and it's been going on forever."

The Tim Donaghy gambling scandal that rocked the NBA has produced many subplots, among them Donaghy's assertion in a court document that improper relationships between referees and league officials (such as players, coaches and scouts) could influence the outcomes of games. Naturally, the theory was immediately dismissed by David Stern.

But it seemed to me Donaghy was making a decent point, and it got me thinking about the college game and how unusual relationships between referees and schools could similarly influence the outcomes of games.

And by relationships, I mean actual business relationships.

College basketball programs, you see, regularly hold intrasquad scrimmages in the fall and during the season, and it's common for NCAA referees to officiate those scrimmages. In fact, I couldn't find a single coach in a random poll at the LeBron James Skills Academy earlier this month who doesn't use NCAA referees for scrimmages, and the going rate for an hour of work is somewhere between $100 and $200, most acknowledged.

Furthermore, schools also typically take referees on foreign trips, meaning referees enjoy what is basically a vacation to Mexico or Europe or Canada every year with schools paying all their expenses. So what we have are referees making thousands of extra dollars per year from schools -- and taking all-expenses-paid trips out of the country with teams -- and then calling games featuring the same schools from which they literally receive paychecks.

It's a questionable practice, particularly when you think of it in these terms: Let's pretend a referee took a summer trip with, say, John Pelphrey and Arkansas to Cancun. It's all-expenses paid, all the food and drinks he can handle in exchange for officiating three games over a five-day period. Now let's pretend that same referee, who lives in the Fayetteville area, also works 10 scrimmages for Arkansas during the preseason at $150 each. And now let's pretend it's December, and that same referee is assigned to an Arkansas-Oklahoma game, and Pelphrey is out of the coach's box, going crazy, stomping his foot, screaming and yelling about a call.