What Do Gil Thorp And Saturday Night Live Have In Common ???
 

... A lack of NFHS basketball rules knowledge.

These are two high school games.

One can easily spot two errors in each photo.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...436cf7af_c.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...41e3a6c4_c.jpg

A Little Corner Of Connecticut ...
 

Gil Thorp is a sports-oriented comic strip which has been published since September 8, 1958. The main character, Gil Thorp, is the athletic director of Milford High School and coaches the football, basketball, and baseball teams. The strip was created by Jack Berrill, who modeled and named Thorp after baseball player Gil Hodges and Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe. The setting of Milford is named for New Milford, Connecticut. Berrill lived in nearby Brookfield, Connecticut.

The strip has been drawn by several illustrators over the past sixty years: Berrill, Warren Sattler, Frank Bolle, Ray Burns, Frank McLaughlin, and now Rod Whigham.

Editors should run the strip by a basketball official (or a football official, or a baseball umpire) before publishing.

The strip often covers other high school sports: ice hockey, softball, wrestling, golf, etc.

Live From New York ...
 

Unlike its origin almost fifty years ago, Saturday Night Live is now known for it's very realistic and detail oriented sets and costumes, that the producers spend a lot of time and money on.

They missed the boat this time.

I wish that they had called me (or some other basketball official) first.

Rule 10-6-4 only prohibits players to "participate" with an illegal number. Number 9 is just the official locker room pep talk guy. (sorry Billy, couldn't resist!)

Carl Yastrzemski And Mickey Mantle ...
 

There was also a #8, so on a six player team, somebody with an illegal number had to play.

Also, there's a third error, this is a home game for the Hillside High School Tigers.

Note: There was once a single Hillside High School in Minnesota (a state where the home teams wear dark jerseys), but it's now an early childhood center, and the present high school (no longer called Hillside High School) mascot is the "Storm".

In college, this might be legal. 9 is now a legal number for both men's and women's basketball. However, I have no idea in what universe brown can be considered a light color. At the same time, if the two schools agree to have the home team wear the brown uniforms (because the home team's conference certifies in writing that brown contrasts with the other teams color), that could happen. However, a team playing in brown definitely would not be able to do so with white undershirts.

At the NFHS level, this is completely illegal. However, what rubbed me the most the wrong way was shooting free throws for an offensive foul. They don't do that in the NBA, because offensive fouls do not count towards the penalty at that level (unlike amateur basketball, the foul count is referred to from the point of view of the team committing the foul, so that 5 fouls in each quarter (or 2 in the last 2 minutes) triggers the penalty against them. In amateur basketball, the rules view the foul count as providing the offended team with the opportunity for bonus free throws)). That does not happen at any other level either. Loose ball fouls may look like offensive fouls, because they are committed by the team that last had control of the ball, but at the levels that have them (NCAAM and NBA) they are explicitly defined as NOT being player/team control/offensive fouls.. In an NFHS or NCAAM game, offensive foul is the wrong term as well. This means that one comic book panel managed to get three things wrong at once (#7 is an illegal number and Barnes is shooting free throws for an "offensive foul").

Interscholastic ...
 

"And that's halftime with Valley High leading Hillside by thirty points"

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OgurOaVqoDc?si=YonAVdwMDxgNMqUW" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Play-By-Play Man ...
 

"Offensive" foul was stated by Marty Moon, the obnoxious play-by-play man for WMFD radio, whose descriptions serve as narrative for the strip's game sequences, so we should all expect such a mistake by an announcer (but an announcer should know that there will be no free throws due to this being player control foul).

"Offensive Foul! Rodney Barnes Will Shoot Two!"

Note: Moon tried to steal poetry teacher Holly Dobbs, Thorp's fiancé. Dobbs ran out on Thorp soon after Thorp and Dobbs were engaged.