bad news about injured player

[Texas Aggie]

One of the biggest myths in sports is if the official calls something you will prevent someone from being hurt.

I've been saying this for years. I defy anyone to show me how a call or non-call would cause or prevent an injury. The myth in basketball is that if you don't call more fouls, the contact becomes harder or is increased. That's bull. The roughest games I've had were the ones where a bunch of fouls were called. But even then, I'd argue that one thing has nothing to do with the other. The game is going to be well played, or ugly, and that's determined by the two teams playing.

If the argument is that teams don't like the calls and get out of control, how am I supposed to respond if I believe the calls or non-calls made are correct? Make calls that I think aren't correct?

I had a coach in football tell me in pregame that he was deathly afraid of injuries to his kids. I said, "fine; I guarantee you my guys won't hurt them. Other than that, I'm not sure what I can do about it. Most injuries happen on legal plays. For the ones that happen on illegal plays, the flag isn't going to heal the injury, so the only real question becomes whether we make the correct call or not. I can assure you our goal tonight will be to get the calls correct, but I can't make any assurances about injuries on anyone' part -- your players, your opponents, or even you and I."

He seemed a bit annoyed, but I didn't really leave him with anything to argue about. I was very annoyed that he thinks officials have something to do with preventing injuries. In fact its one of my pet peeves (if you can't already tell)!

[jdw3018]

While I agree with everyone that in general calls (or no-calls) don't cause injuries, there are a few things we CAN do to potentially help prevent them. They are all non-basketball type plays. We can call a violation for swinging elbows the first time it happens and not wait for blood and teeth to attempt to stop the action. We can penalize unsporting conduct when it happens, which may prevent it from escalating into physical conduct. We can penalize intentional fouls when they are committed in late-game fouling and not allow the conduct to escalate.

Again, never are officials to blame for injuries. However, we can penalize conduct to reduce the chances of non-basketball plays escalating into actions that cause injuries.