Mental Error
 

Here's a hypothetical:

In a scrum for the ball, B1 fouls A1 and the official has a patient whistle on it, but gets it. After the players are sorted out, he reports the foul….. On A1, then gives the ball to A for a throwin. Let's just say he lost focus for a moment.

A takes the ball down and throws it out of bounds. The table then calls the official over to inform him he gave the ball to the wrong team following the previous foul. He tells the table it's too late to fix it, and just cops to the error. No big deal.

Over the next few minutes, however, he thinks about the play and realizes the mistake was not in who got the ball. The mistake was made when he reported the foul on A1 rather than B1. Here's the question: How late is too late to fix this?

Don't have a rule book in front of me...but I'm guessing it's not to late to change the foul, but you couldn't change anything else that happened as a result?

I believe it's never too late. To tag on to this, Should that foul cause a 1and 1 sitch and team b shoots and makes a free throw, can that score be erased as team b wasn't in the bonus. Does the 'after the next dead ball' rule apply?

What if it happened in 1977? :D

You treat it as a bookkeeping mistake, and bookkeeping mistakes can be fixed until the final score has been approved. Rule 2-11-11.

The "after the next dead ball" is only part of the rules guideline. The important thing to remember is that the clock has to start before you even begin to start counting the dead balls. Correctable errors can be fixed up to and including the first dead ball <b>after</b> the clock starts after the error was made.

while I agree
 

I agree with JR to treat it as a bookeeping issue. However it is NOT a bookeeping issue, it is an officials error. Bookeeping issue would be reporting the foul on A1 and the bookeeper giving it to B1.

Does anyone have an issue with this? Right or Wrong, this is not listed in the scorer's or timekeeper's duties, is it?

The table is part of the officiating crew and should notify the referee in instances were they find an error occurred.

By definition, correctable errors are errors made by the floor officials and there is a defined time period as to when a correctable error can be corrected. In the situation being discussed, all we have is a mistake by one of the floor officials which can be corrected as per JR's post (Post #5). The question that needs to be addressed is whether correcting the scorebook resulted in failure to award a merited free throw and if it did was the correctable error discovered in the defined time period.

MTD, Sr.

Right - the foul can be changed at any point when the error is discovered. What cannot be changed after the "correctable error" time period is any free throw/scoring play resulting from that error.

Absolutely Correct!!!!

I have it now. The semantics confused me. The table presume they have the foul on the wrong team because of which team inbounded the ball. Therefore, they should clarify on whom the foul was called.

If I'm the R on a game, I'm not penalizing a kid and sticking him with an undeserved foul just because my partner said "white" when he meant "blue."
Snaqwells (the OP for this thread) and I just discussed this in a thread about two weeks ago.
http://forum.officiating.com/showthread.php?t=39618

We agreed that it would be nice to see a clarification of this from the NFHS.