It’s a crap shoot… Officials are assigned games according to their Availability and ranking.
I am not sure how you know the other officials were end of year tournaments or NCAA tournament officials. Most of the time, you do not know who they are until game time and unless you track their games… you would have no way of knowing.
Most conferences rate their officials after every game, the conference head of officials reviews the games (staff does this) and reads the reports that the coaches submit.
No, the conference did not run out of money, at the beginning of the season they negotiated with officials group for a set fee. I believe (I could be wrong) that the PAC-12 pays their officials $1600-2000 a game, while lower one like WCC is around 450-1200. THAT is a big difference.
I know a lot of officials that do the PAC-12, because most of them also do baseball. I am not saying all of them are this way, but the ones I know, they are good officials who really does not care who wins or loses, all they care about is calling the game consistently.
Like I said, a lot of times it simply the luck of the draw, if a good official is available, he can choose to do a WCC game with lower pay, because the real reason the official is doing this in the first place is because they love doing it.
The you have to consider the human elements… coaches makes mistakes, players makes mistakes and YES even officials have off days where they are not performing to the level of the skills. It happens, you never had a bad day at work?
I am not excusing the officiating, one thing I always taught the inexperienced officials is that if you are fair, and hustle and above all consistent, it will cover a multitude of sins.
Contrary to what some may think, I have also seen where officials because of personal bias towards teams/coaches/players, costs teams wins. It disgusts me to no end. But it is hard to prove it.
Coach Rose does have some power in this, after each game he can write his views on the officiating and submit it to the Conference, I know Coach Arnold many years ago black balled an official for ever doing BYU games because of the way he officiate one of the Cougars games. It does not happen very often, but it does happen.