No. 8 UCLA fell from grace this weekend, losing two close games to their neighbors to the north, No. 5 Stanford and unranked Cal. The Cardinal pulled out a close 63-61 victory to win a share of the Pac-10 regular season championship on Thursday, and on Saturday, the Golden Bears squeezed out a close 80-79 win over the Bruins.

If only the refs played by the rules.

UCLA didn't lose two games this weekend. They didn't even lose one. They beat the Cardinal in overtime, 77-67, and Cal in regulation, 81-80. But the term "beat" must be applied loosely, for one phantom foul and another non-call were the reasons behind the Bruins' victories. Make no mistake about it: the referees handed UCLA two conference wins, two games more than the Bruins should have won all weekend. Against the Cardinal, UCLA did an admirable job of erasing a double-digit deficit to tie the game at 61 points a piece with about 15 seconds remaining in the second half. Stanford junior forward Lawrence Hill took over on the ensuing Cardinal possession, driving to the lane before putting up a tough running shot that found the net.

63-61 Cardinal.

With just under eight seconds left, UCLA's Darren Collison took the ball up court to the left side of the Stanford basket, where he rose for a jumper. Hill jumped as well, swatting the ball out of Collison's guard hands but fouling him in the process with only 2.5 seconds left in the game. Collison went to the line and hit both free throws, which sent the game to overtime.

The only problem? There was no foul on the play.

Hill stuffed the ball cleanly - there was literally no connection between Hill's hands and Collison's. But despite Fox Sports Net's announcers' insistence that the foul was called because of illegal hand-to-hand contact, the referee actually called a hip-check - that is, Hill's body touched Collison's when the two jumped in the air. The official that made the call, Kevin Brill, was not the baseline judge, who had the clearest view of the play. Brill was instead an outside official who was standing on the three-point arc - he saw the play from a decent distance. The baseline referee never blew his whistle.

And for good reason: the contact between Hill's body and Collison's was, at the very most, extremely minimal. It did not alter the shot. Hill rose straight up, as did Collison. For a fraction of a second, their midsections grazed. It was hardly enough contact for a foul to be called.

After the game, Bill McCabe, the Pac-10 Coordinator of Officials (in other words, Brill's boss), told ESPN as much.

"It's not a strong call, not an appropriate call," he said. "I think you want a strong call at the close of the game."

Many in the media - including The Daily's Daniel Novinson - theorized that it was a make-up foul for a non-call on Hill's basket, when Bruin center Kevin Love appeared to take a charge.

But this is an incorrect justification: Hill was running from right to left, and on the shot, his body weight shifted sideways as he jumped, not forward and into Love. Though there was some contact, there wasn't a foul.

At the end of the game, you do not call fouls that may or may not have happened - it's not a "solid" call, as McCabe would say. You especially don't do it when you haven't been blowing your whistle much to begin with. Brook Lopez, for example, played nearly the entire game in the post, absorbing a number of hits that had much more of an impact than Hill's had on Collison.

He didn't go to the free throw line until the 8:56 mark of the second half. Though there should be no debate on Hill's foul, there should be even less of a discussion about the end of the UCLA-Cal game on Saturday night.

On the heels of a controversial out-of-bounds call that gave UCLA the ball, Josh Shipp hit an incredible basket with 1.6 seconds left to give the Bruins an 81-80 lead. Shipp shot the ball from the baseline behind the basket. The ball traveled over the backboard and into the hoop. It was a remarkable play. It was also illegal.

NCAA Rule 7, Section 1, Article 3 said, "The ball shall be out of bounds whenever it passes over the backboard from any direction."

The officials claim that the ball went over the corner of the backboard, but close examination of the replay shows that it passed over the right-most top edge of the glass.

It is an open and shut case: it should have been Cal ball underneath their basket with a second left, the Bears leading 80-79.

A common mantra has been repeated at length over the past few days - "You don't lose a game on one play."

In these two instances, I can't disagree more.

ESPN's Doug Gottlieb said, "[The announcers] said 'You've got to give UCLA credit.' No, you don't. They were going to lose."

Twice.