Somewhere in the back pages of the Coaching Handbook is a rarely used ploy.

If your team loses a game you think will be damaging to your players’ psyches and the game contained some marginal calls that went against you, blame the officials.

So it was Saturday when Texas Tech coach Mike Leach second-guessed the Big 12 Conference for assigning referee Randy Christal, who lives in Austin, Texas – home of Texas University – to the UT-Tech game.

Was Christal prejudiced against the Red Raiders? Doubtful.

If Christal isn’t the league’s best referee, he’s in the top three. Christal worked last year’s Big 12 championship game, for instance, and that’s a plum assignment awarded to the league’s top-rated official during the regular season.

Still, you have to wonder why the Big 12 Conference would place Christal in a position where his dedication and professionalism might be called into question.

Walt Anderson, now in his second season as the league’s coordinator of football officials, blew it. He had other options.

On Saturday, Anderson had six crews working. Half of them were headed by referees from Texas – Christal, Jon Bible (also from Austin, by the way) and Cooper Castleberry. Bible was assigned to the Oklahoma-Baylor game, while Castleberry worked the Kansas-Oklahoma State game.

The other crew chiefs on the field Saturday were Clete Blakeman and Tom Walker, both of Omaha, Neb., and Gerald Wright of Albuquerque, N.M. Blakeman did Colorado-Iowa State, Walker whistled Missouri-Texas A&M, and Wright was in charge at Kansas State-Nebraska.

As you can see, Anderson easily could have switched Christal’s crew with the Blakeman, Walker or Wright septets and avoided any provincial controversy.

Further compounding Anderson’s mistake is the fact officiating switches are made all the time based on both geography and diploma, and not just at the referee level. A couple of league officials from Columbia, Mo., for example, never are assigned to do MU games.

Jim Adams, a banker who moved to Lawrence a couple of years ago from Hays, also is on the Big 12 officials roster. Has he ever worked a KU game? Never. Will he? Not likely.

In a similar vein, Blakeman won’t ever be ticketed to work a Nebraska game because he quarterbacked the Cornhuskers back in the late 1980s.

Two former KU football players – both umpires – are currently on the Big 12 officials roster. Tom Quick, a former wide receiver (1984-86), hasn’t done a KU game in the five years he’s been in the league. John “Butch” Mascarello, a former offensive guard (1975-77), has worked one – the Florida International game earlier this season.

On Saturday, Quick umpired the KSU-Nebraska game, while Mascarello was in uniform at the OU-Baylor game.

In assigning officials, it’s clear the Big 12 doesn’t want a crew to work too many games involving one team. Christal, for instance, has refereed two KU games (K-State and Nebraska), and so have Bible, Castleberry and Blakeman.

So I would be surprised to see Christal and his crew at Saturday’s KU-Iowa State game : or at any more Texas games, for that matter.