Notice NCAA tournament blatant disregard for 6-foot closely guarded distance?

[Mark Padgett]

One of my pet peeves with the FED rules is that we're supposed to be enforcing the six foot rule when a defender is just standing within six feet of the ball handler even if he's looking at the ceiling and picking his nose. To me, the term "closely guarded" means the defender is actually "guarding" the guy.

Now, I realize it would be virtually impossible to have the rule changed to only be enforced if, in the opinion of the official, the defender was actually putting some defensive pressure on the ball handler, so I don't have a good suggestion on how to change the rule, unless it's to just zap it.

I do agree with those of you who feel that if you have a shot clock, there's no need to have a 10 second back court rule, so maybe we can include the five second rule in that same argument.