Quote:
Originally Posted by CMHCoachNRef
JR,
I passed this question along to one of our local rules interpretors. His view, interestingly, was basically the same as mine. Since the information came from the Official Book, that informatoin is, well, official. Therefore, he would not allow such a change to take place in the book, thus granting the timeout without penalty.
I have posed the exact question to numerous officials since this posting hit this past week. NOT ONE official that I have presented this situation to would call this technical foul. One official who has worked a State Final indicated that he would have, when informed of the error by the timer, not grant the timeout (since the coach would not have requested it had he not been informed that he did, indeed, have one). He would have immediately put the ball back in play and not allow any subs.
|
Interesting. You have a local rules interpreter that advocates ignoring a very plainly written rule. And you haven't found any officials at all in your area that would also also follow a plainly written rule--for whatever reasons. And you've got a state final official that also wouldn't follow a plainly written rule. A state final official that would grant a TO, find out that it's an excess TO, and then cancel the TO so that he didn't have to call a "T". I'd
love to see your state final official make that call at the end of a state championship game. Fwiw and if it'll make you feel better, Chris Webber would probably agree with that state official in a heartbeat though .
Methinks that your area has a heckuva lot of work to do in the education of their officials. Note that's jmo.
In my experience, I don't know one
good official that wouldn't make that call. They might not like the rule personally and they also personally might not want to follow the rule, but they would do it. the
caveat obviously is that I and they are not in your area(I think).
And information from the scorebook is..well... official? Cool. Gee, I take it that under that philosophy we can't go back and correct any scorer's errors made under rule 2-10 or fix any scorer's mistakes under rule 2-11-11 either. Heckuva idea ...and a heckuva rules interpreter you got there, Coach.
Btw, mentioning rule 2-11-11, I guess your rules interpreter never read the l'il sentence in there that says
"A bookkeeping mistake may be corrected at any time until the referee approves the final score. Nope, once it's entered in the scorebook, it's ..well...official.
And right there, folks, you'll find the biggest difference between how a coach thinks and how an official thinks. A coach thinks that a rule should only be valid and enforced if it's fair to
his team in
his opinion. An official knows that the rules were written trying to be fair to
BOTH teams, and that if we won't follow a plainly written rule it not only gives an unfair advantage to one team but it unfairly penalizes the other team at the same time. You only worry about
YOUR team, coach. But we have to worry about
BOTH teams. And if we don't call that deserved "T" in the play being discussed, we just screwed the
other team.
Sorry, coach, we completely disagree philosophically on this one and we always will.