ACC Checks On Officials Regularly

PINEHURST, N.C., July 24 -- The Atlantic Coast Conference has performed background checks for the past year on game officials in three sports in an effort to prevent gambling scandals such as the one faced by the NBA.

During an annual wide-ranging news conference Tuesday, conference commissioner John Swofford also said the league would decide in December where to host its football championship games in 2008-10 and discussed how the ACC is preparing for another two-year term coordinating Bowl Championship Series operations beginning in January.

The dominant issue was the background checks, which Swofford said were approved by university presidents two years ago and begun last year on officials in football and men's and women's basketball.

"It's not a catch-all, end-all by any means, but it does show a proactive way of looking at this and hopefully raising red flags if there are any to be raised," Swofford said.

About 75 of the roughly 225 officials in those sports will be investigated each year, and every official's background will be checked once in a four-year period, said Shane Lyons, the league's associate commissioner for compliance.

Swofford said the ACC and Big Ten are the only conferences to implement the checks, which cost $135 apiece.

The ACC-ordered probes, performed by an independent agency, include an investigation into any ties to gambling on sports, officials' credit histories and criminal and driving records at the local, state and federal levels. The NCAA performs similar checks on officials working its basketball tournaments and bowl games, he said.

None of the officials investigated showed any warning signs that might have led to a removal from officiating games, Lyons said.

"There wasn't anything that we saw that concerned us, that stimulated our belief that we should take this route," Swofford said. "But this whole issue of gambling is so prevalent in our society. . . . We just simply want to do everything we can proactively to have that kind of integrity in our officials as well as our student-athletes."