Correctable Error Situation....First Part...

[CMHCoachNRef]

Originally Posted by Nevadaref

The philosophy of the CE rule has been debated many times. Either BktBallRef or Bob Jenkins put it very elegantly. The comment was that the rule is not designed to be fair. It is designed such that each team has an incentive to prevent the error from occurring and get the situation right in the first place. Otherwise, what at first looks to be a potential benefit to their team may well come back to hurt them later. That can clearly be seen in the situation which you have posed.

The team which committed the technical foul earlier should have pointed out to the officials that this foul was incorrectly not being counted as a team foul. There was significant time to do this prior to the 7th team foul of the half being committed. Instead it is possible that this team thought, "Oh good, they aren't counting the T as a team foul. That's good for us." However, later it came back to cost them.

Nevadaref,
First of all, I always appreciate the views and recollections that you, BktBallRef and Bob have to share.

I do have a couple concerns with this. First of all, I am never in favor of a situation that is not designed to be fair. Secondly, as long as the gamble can work, I don't think that creating a punitive scenario is the best way to handle the situation. In many cases, the two scorekeepers consider themselves to be a "team" throughout the game. In these cases, they would be making an error as a team -- completely by accident. Yet, the team is faced with double jeopardy (being penalized twice). Regardless how eloquently stated, I think the NFHS implementation here is poor at best.