Quote:
Originally Posted by Smitty
Of course not. All our assigners were there as well as the gentleman giving us the Intentional Foul directive. His official title in the association is "Observation Chair", but he's the main guy who goes out and evaluates officials at games and reports back to the assignments team. Then he went through a pretty decent description of how we should be calling block/charges and how most block calls should actually be charges - I agree with him on that.
And then the head assigner went through about a dozen block/charge videos that essentially half the association couldn't agree on, and no clear direction was given whether any of them were one or the other. Even after the head assigner said he had shown many of them to D1 officials and even they couldn't agree.
This job is not easy.
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Essentially, you have a local leadership that doesn't want to do what the NFHS wants done. You have to do what your local group asks for if you want to work, but that doesn't make it right (or consistent).
With different interpretations in every group, there will be inconsistency, guaranteed. The NFHS is trying to establish one interpretation. Some groups don't like it and will do their own thing.
Much like the handchecking issues that drug on for the better part of a decade, there were many that just bucked calling it the way they were saying it should be call. Eventually, by explicit rule changes, they got (mostly) the change they wanted. Some deny that 10 years of POEs existed but that doesn't change the fact that the NFHS wanted it called a certain way. Once it was done across the country, players adjusted and the game actually got better....and back to what basketball was supposed to be.
What will be done here for IFs? I don't know, yet. It will probably be stepped up to some degree, but not to the point of calling all of the posted videos as IFs.
All it takes is for enough officials to just call it and the players will find another way to foul on purpose without infringing on the IF rules. There would be a phase of adjustment, but then it would be solved. When you have entire groups bucking the directions given by the NFHS, that can't happen effectively.