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Hope it is kosher to exhume this thread and inquire whether a defender is courting the X with you if he closes out on the ballhandler, then on the dribble past him uses his near hand to get some jersey while at the same time swinging the far hand around to take a swipe at the ball upward (from which hard contact rarely if ever results.) The coach teaching this method (and calling someting like "Red!" from the bench) is hoping that even those officials with a lower X threshold will view the jersey grab as enough of a quasi-improvised attempt to get the position and leverage to make the upward swipe (admittedly most often a whiff) at the ball to pass muster -- avoiding the intentional, but impeding the ballhandler enough to draw the foul.
Of course if the defender is too slow he will whiff with BOTH hands, drawing nothing and accomplishing even less (the comedy of errors described above.) But I wonder whether you have ever been tempted to X something like this when the jersey is tugged? Would it depend on the severity of the tug? (Assume there is nothing close to a pirouette occuring.) Would it matter if the defenders started tugging with one or two team fouls, rather than five or six?
And might it in fact be an intentional personal foul under the letter of NCAA guideline at least, which describes "grabbing a player's arm or body while initially attempting to gain control by playing the ball directly . . . " as sufficient? Grabbing nothing but fabric seems more plainly a problem under the off-ball guideline ("grabbing holding or pushing A PLAYER"), but might be OK on the ballhandler as the jersey is, most strictly speaking, neither "arm" nor "body"?
As a coach in these situations I really do appreciate the officials that get the first foul on anything close -- and that's true whether I am fouling or being put on the line. When the defenders don't get the calls and start coming at it harder, nothing good can happen, it seems to me, X or no X.
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