Quote:
Originally Posted by RandyBrown
>>Your vast experience needs some tweeking here. Most times, on a rebounding push, we ignore it if the shot goes in. There's no real advantage as there's no rebound to be "stolen." Now, if displacement is significant (measurable in yards rather than inches or even feet), we sometimes go get it anyway.
“Most times”?! “Yards rather than inches or even feet”?! And you mock me?! No one can make you appreciate Points of Emphasis #1. The Committee can repeat it every year, forever. As long as assignors and local boards don’t enforce it, it isn’t ever going to make a difference with some. They just don’t get it. I appreciate what you’re saying, believe me--I get “patient whistle”, but that doesn’t mean I accept it as a philosophy. It has proven itself to be a slippery slope, you must agree. NFHS is not imagining the negative impact from our deviation--they experience it. Committee members are from all over the country. I’m sure they are constantly talking to coaches and ADs. If we don’t use the rules-as-written as the line in the sand, then there is no common line—it varies with every official as we slide down the slope. Coaches and ADs and parents, through NFHS, get to make the rules, not us. You clearly do not appreciate The Intent and Purpose of the Rules, (p.7), which is why the Committee felt the need to write POI #1. Your comment in opposition to “a foul is a foul” is true in my neck of the woods, too, but your acceptance of it makes you a member of their target audience. I’m not comfortable there, and never intend to be.
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I've got to tell you I have no intention of reading your entire response. The crux of your position seems to asking us to just quote the rules. Why? You can read them, right? The fact is, "incidental" is no where stated in the dead ball contact rule. Stick to the right words, correct?
As for this post, it's not me who is displaying an inability to understand the purpose and intent of the rules.
Here's what it boils down to with contact (completely off topic from the OP, but hey, we do that all the time). There's too much contact on the court to call it all a foul, so we have to have a way of deciding which contact to call and which to ignore. How? The incidental contact rule, and even the very definition of "foul." To paraphrase, "contact which does not prevent the opponent from performing normal defensive or offensive movements should be ruled incidental."
How this is interpreted probably varies widely by region, but from your comments above, your area isn't appreciably different than mine in this regard.
If you have a dribbler driving past a defender, and the defender slaps the arm of the dribbler while getting beat, are you going to call the foul?
You have two rebounders, one behind the other facing the basket. The one behind pushes the one in front so that it moves him a couple of inches; yet the one in front gets the rebound. Are you going to call that foul based on your "a foul is a foul" theory?
"A foul is a foul" is, quite simply, the ultimate truism; and just as meaningless. Most officials realize that not all contact is a foul.
Now, I realize I've been a bit snarky lately, and for that I apologize. Chalk it up to sleep apnea or something.