Imagine you're standing in line at your local deli. The person behind the counter is slicing your cheese, and you don't like the thickness of the cut.
How do you respond? You erupt in boos.
Uh-oh. Now the person is getting nervous. He's slicing cheese too thin. He's slicing it too thick. You're only getting more and more annoyed, and the boos start getting louder.
Eventually, the deli employee freaks out and cuts off part of his thumb. Now look what you've done.
Obviously, you're not going to be booing the person slicing your salami. But why do fans at sporting events boo referees? No good can come from it.
At the UF men's basketball game against South Carolina on Tuesday night, the referees missed what was - to me and most of the fans in the O'Connell Center - an incredibly obvious goaltending call, effectively taking 2 points away from the Gators.
The crowd responded by immediately screaming at them and yelling obscenities, a staple of rowdy fans, without ever thinking there was a huge chance the refs' lines of sight had been blocked by 6-foot-tall players.
But think about what you're doing to the man in stripes.
When a referee gets booed, he becomes more aware of the bad calls he's making, and he will only proceed to make more of them as pressure from the fans rains down on him.
The other bad thing that could happen when fans boo an official would be an unconscious bias against the home team. When you're getting booed by 90,000 people at The Swamp, you're going to dislike The Swamp a little bit. That could result, unintentionally, of course, in more calls against the home team.
Unless you believe in the make-up call, which I don't, the officiating will only get worse with boos. The make-up call is a common misconception in that it is actually just bad refereeing that happens to be in the other direction. Refs are trained to ignore jeers, but their job is hard enough as it is. They don't need people screaming curses at them or telling them they're blind.
So it makes sense for fans to keep their reactions to themselves. The coaches and players on the floor let the referees hear their anger plenty, and they do so respectfully.
"If there was a call that we question, we just want to know what we could have done to get a call go our way," UF center Alex Tyus said Tuesday night.
I can say booing officials is not smart all I want, but it's not like I'm completely innocent of this infraction either. God knows I booed the referees subconsciously while sitting in the upper deck of the Miami Dolphins' huge first-round playoff loss to the Baltimore Ravens on Jan. 4. What were those idiot zebras thinking?
Booing the referees isn't logical, but that doesn't stop fans from expressing themselves in the heat of the moment.
Tyus has an explanation.
"They're just watching the game," Tyus said. "They're spectators."
I'll admit it's part of the game, but it doesn't really make sense.
Logically, chastising an official for a job poorly done will only lead to worse job performance, more bad calls and distaste for the home crowd.
But that doesn't stop the people in the bleachers from telling referees to get a new set of glasses or to get their mouths off their whistles, and it doesn't seem like anything will.
