Possesion Arrow Error

[TimTaylor]

Originally Posted by Camron Rust

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Over and over, I've said I'm talking about a timing race between the whistle for T vs. the shot....which, for anyone that actually read the posts, should have been obvious. I used terms like "moment", "one or two seconds", etc. Every example play I presented to demonstrate my point was a bang-bang-bang play where the infraction under question, the shot, and the whistle were one right after the other.

Once you've moved on and hit the point where coach H (in the original #6) got the T, it is definitely too late to go back and do anything...I've NEVER said otherwise.

No argument here Cam. As I've before, if it's reasonably prompt - all occurs within a second or two - we can sell it pretty effectively, and I think that most of us agree that anything much beyond that is going to be too late.

My concerns with this specific situation are:

1. The officials really screwed the pooch on this one. It's their job to know which team gets the ball after the TO, and this is doubly important in a close game down the stretch. If they'd paid attention and done their job correctly, the situation never would have occurred.

2. Is a T justified in this situation? Certainly the comment by coach V is suspicious, but IMHO it is not enough in and of itself to justify a T. What was the context? Maybe he just realized at the last second his team was mistakenly given the ball for throw-in. You'd think that if it was a deliberate act, he'd be smart enough to not overtly attract attention to it....playing dumb would be a much smarter approach. I think it's one of those HTBT situations.......

3. Ambiguities and outright contradictions within the NFHS rules and interpretations. There's plenty of parallels within the rules that place a time limit on when a penalty can be assessed - for example, an illegal sub becomes a player once the ball becomes live and you can no longer penalize. Does anything similar apply here? How does the official wrongly giving the ball to a thrower from the wrong team affect it? Does it fall into the "when occurred" or "when discovered" category?

A key issue in this discussion is "did the ball become live?" Rule 6-1-2-b says it becomes live on a throw-in, when it is at the disposal of the thrower. If we proceed to throw-in administration, 7-6-2 says "The throw-in starts when the ball is at the disposal of a player of the team entitled to the throw-in." At face value, you'd expect that this means the ball isn't live until both the above conditions are satisfied, but we have a case play that directly contradicts that, saying that we can't correct giving the ball to the wrong team for throw-in once the throw in ends. Yes, the specific case involves an AP situation, but it doesn't specifically limit itself to that situation as some case interps clearly do, implying that it would be valid for any wrong team throw-in administration error by the official - this is further supported by the fact giving the ball to the wrong team for throw-in is not included in the list of correctable errors specified by rule. How can a throw in end if according to 7-6-2 it never started? In the case of a made basket it's clear the ball doesn't become live until it's at the disposal of the team entitled to the throw-in, but from the interp it appears that on a throw-in administered by an official that's not necessarily the case, and at least some of the time the ball becomes live when given to the thrower, whether they're from the correct team or not. Like I said, ambiguous and contradictory.....a little consistency would be nice......