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Originally Posted by JRutledge
I would take that a step further. Many officials do not care what coaches think about foul counts at any time of the game. I mainly concern myself with foul counts to know if we are close to a bonus situation. Outside of that if a coach complains, it is not going to change anything. Actually, most complaining coaches engage in means little or nothing but takes away their credibility.
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Complaining about the foul count is about as sure a way as any to get me to tune a coach out. It's a "crying wolf" scenario. Same as the coach who never really says anything across the line, but always wants a travel, or 3 seconds, or "watch the handchecking" every other trip down the court. It eliminates that coach's ability to get my attention to question something legitimately.
I had a freshman level game a couple weeks ago where I was trail for free throws and the coach wanted to complain because his team had 3 fouls and the other team had none 2:30 into the game. I just leaned over and said, "Coach, I'll be happy to talk to you about legitimate questions or rules applications when I can, but if you want to talk about the foul count I'm pretty good at tuning that out and it's hard to get my attention back."
It worked in that game. I normally wouldn't have said anything, but it got that coach focused on the game, and he had just 2 or 3 "complaints" the rest of the night, all of which came with pretty good questions we could answer.