Question

[Jurassic Referee]

Originally Posted by Ch1town

Jurrasic, I value your opinions & think you provide the forum with great knowledge, in fact I was hoping to see you chime in with some answers to my OP.
The 80/20 principle helped me alot because as we know any yahoo can blow a whistle & call fouls, but a good official has a feel for the game & can determine whether certain contact warrants a foul being called. 80/20 is good way to make good block shots calls vs. a foul IMHO.

I'm sorry for not responding earlier; I simply did not see this post. My apologies.

I'll try to answer it the best way that I can, bearing in mind that there really is no way to definitively answer the questions that have arisen imo.

Calling a foul for contact on a block attempt is a straight judgment call imo. The rules give us some guidance, but they don't cover all situations, also imo. For instance, NFHS case book play 4.19.3SitB states that you you should call an intentional foul if defensive contact from behind puts the shooter on the floor, even though the defender may have gotten "all ball" on the block. The bottom line though is that each individual official has to judge whether the contact that occurs on plays like these is incidental contact or illegal contact. The gray area also increases when you move from level to level. More physical contact is expected at the D1 level as opposed to, say, the JV high school level. Some D1 conferences are traditionally known for allowing a greater level of contact also.

Each official usually formulates their own tolerance level through experience and also by observing fellow local officials when it comes to the amount of contact that they will allow during a shot. As I said, it's simply a judgment call by the calling official anyway. Hopefully, you end up calling the contact consistently and evenly at both ends of the court. Players and coaches need those guidelines established so that they know what they can do and not do in that particular game.

Note that the "consistency" that I'm talking about sureasheck is not Old School's brand of consistency where he is advocating repeating bad calls.

80/20 is completely meaningless in the context of what I've described above imo. All that is doing, also imo, is making the call harder and more confusing, especially to newer officials. Maybe I'm not good enough, but I don't think that I could just freeze-frame a call and then try to decide whether there was 79, 80, 0r 81% contact. That's way too deep for me. All I do do is look at the play and say that the defender either whacked the shooter and gained an illegal advantage by doing so, or the defender made incidental contact that didn't affect the shooter enough to warrant a foul call. The bottom line is still that the call depends on your judgment. As I said, I'm a firm believer in not trying to overthink what you're doing out there.

I also personally use a "push" foul signal if I deemed that the defender committed illegal contact with his body, and the "illegal use of hand" signal if the defender whacked the shooter on an arm.

Don't know if that helps any, but as I said, I really don't think that there really is a definitive answer as to what constitutes a foul in these situations. It's a straight judgment call.