I get the "Why did you call B a foul right after you let A go" comment ... especially if A is worse than B.

Just seemed odd to say that they needed to get A right "especially" if they were going to go get B wrong a few seconds later. They needed to get B right too! :)

Gotta say, I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about a call I made at the other end of the floor. I try to make every call a solid call on its own. I think this official failed twice, but it happens.

Where crews struggle is when officials are different in what's advantage and what's disadvantage. At this level and even at the higher HS levels, this should be less of an issue.

They needed to get both right, but it stings a little more cuz things happened the way they did.

Rich,

I usually agree with a majority of your points, however this opinion of yours shocked me. I try to spend the whole game thinking about what my partners and myself called and what we passed on. I think this helps with crew consistency. Ultimately tht is what we are trying to achieve. Now don't get me wrong, if for some reason we as a creew miss a felony, you can bet your bottoem dollar that I will get a felony next play down the court. Can't miss an obvious foul beacuase we missed an earlier one....

I remember years ago, I had a game with two VERY seasoned veterans. We had two teams whose coached combined had 1,300 wins and these guys didn't know me from Adam ( not Adam from this site:D:D ) I remember the first three minutes running up an down calling a couple out of bounds and watching what they called. I thought they were missing fouls, but I followed their lead and the night went pretty well.

No way as trail in the 2nd play am I calling a foul after passing on first play.....

[QUOTE=Multiple Sports;929044]Two wrongs don't make a right, either.

If I miss one (and I know I miss one) at one end, I'm not going to miss one at the other end to make up for it. Being consistently wrong isn't always better than being inconsistent.

(Baseball analogy: Let's say I call the first pitch of the game a strike. The pitch is at the neck and I screw up the call to high heaven. Do I now call every pitch there a strike the rest of the game?)

We can debate the merits of the first call (I think he missed a foul), but the second call was simply not a foul based on what I'm seeing and the fact that the L, right in front of it, passed on it. It has NOTHING to do with the pass at the other end. That's all I'm saying.

Crew consistency is important, yes, but I don't think you can used missed calls when it comes to adjusting to be consistent as a crew.

Sure, we all have our own philosophies and we try to be on board with each other as best we can. Our mechanics set, though, recognizes that we aren't going to be truly consistent from official to official -- otherwise why would we ever switch after fouls?

All we can do is hope, via film study and training, that we can move most of our officials to a place where we all agree what's a foul and what isn't. The NCAA does that via its video bulletins. We do it by our HS associations and video study. I would argue many of us do it looking at video and arguing about it here. :D

While I agree, WRT the OP, I'm guessing the calling official holds to the same ideals and would likely have made the same comment having watched a video involving another official.

Stuff happens, the rest of us get to remind ourselves and learn.

I also try to call what has been called in the game, but I just do not make it up. And what I try to match is mostly the kinds of calls. If hand-checking has been called in the game, I am not going to pass on many hand-checks I clearly see. Or if there is contact on another play, I might pass on that contact if we have not been calling that type of contact previously.

That also applies to no-foul situations. Like a play to the basket that was not called earlier, I am not going to start calling those later in the game either. But mostly these are things I try to do myself or be conscious of what I have called. Not every play or call a partner makes am I totally aware of or saw why they called the game. I think mostly this is a feel for the game than anything.

Peace

To this point. Last year at a camp I had a staffer talk about the crew being consistent. If someone passes on contact, then at least for the next trip or two, contact that was equal to or less than the contact just passed on, should be let go.

In the OP, the first play is a foul, most of us agree on that. However, it wasn't called. There is no reason at all for the next play to have a whistle. I am more concerned with the reasoning for the pass, and the next whistle more than anything.

Passing on something and missing something are not the same. Just because the first foul was missed doesn't mean a 2nd foul, even if somewhat less contact, should be ignored.

Additionally, the official calling the 2nd contact as a foul may have had no view of what did or did not occur on the previous play. Perhaps it really should have been a foul. To criticize them for making a call on less contact than occurred the first official's miss is entirely unfair.

Consistency is good, but it really doesn't mean anything when one of the calls in the comparison is just a miss.

Let's Go To The Videoptape ...
 

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency
Written by Tim Sloan, Bettendorf, Iowa
Released on MyReferee
Copyright© Referee Enterprises, Inc.

In basketball, consistency is a term that few can define but almost everyone can recognize and appreciate in a crew. Provided that a referee doesn't make the game dangerous or take the competitiveness out of it, the good coaches and teams will adjust to what the zebras give them. In fact, you can often pick those coaches' voices out from the mob behind you. Instead of asking, "How could you call that a foul?" they're reminding you, "If you're going to call it at that end. ..."

Consistency for basketball officials really exists on four levels and it's important for their upward mobility to succeed on all four of them.

Self-consistency. Most have heard the debate about whether a foul in the first quarter should necessarily be a foul in the fourth quarter or vice versa. Generically, a foul is a foul. But if you divide them up as safety, advantage-disadvantage and game control fouls, there are many successful officials who preach flexibility on the latter. They feel that you can change the mood of a game for the worse by being too rigid or too loose at the wrong times. Maybe so, but you still have to maintain a level of predictability during a game. If you're like most, trying to deliberately change your standard for calling a foul during a game is like trying to write with your other hand. It's clumsy, frustrating and not very pretty. Changing your standard depends too much on your current mindset. So, it's reasonable to believe that self-consistency over the course of a game breaks down as a result of other factors. Some of the principal ones are fatigue, attitude toward the game and comfort.

Fatigue is an easy one. An official whose heart isn't getting enough blood to the legs isn't getting enough to the brain either. Attention to keys and concentration dwindle as the game wears on and so do the responses. There is no real substitute for being in condition to handle the game. Attitude toward the game changes when the official forgets what I consider to be the golden rule: "You're paid to be here so it doesn't matter what you think of the experience." Call the game and don't cheat them with "good enough." Comfort doesn't refer to the fit of your compression shorts. It means how you're reacting to your surroundings: Do you feel safe? Are people or surroundings distracting you? There are people who can sleep soundly in an orchestra pit and there are referees who can cheerfully blank out the most hostile of environments and keep on doing their jobs. They don't let the fear of a lynching change how they call a game. Learn to deal with stress or learn to manage the issues that threaten you. The great officials can do that.

The bottom line is that the participants need to be able to trust you if you want to keep getting called back. And having the physical and emotional tools to call it consistently is paramount.

Consistency within the crew. Mechanically, I think it's far easier for referees who have never met to work together in a three-person crew than two. That's because they can focus on a more confined area and have to rely less intuitively on their partners to watch their backs for them. There's less of a need for a "system." That goes for crews who have worked together for years, too. Unfortunately, the flip side of that "independence" is the same partners might have more trouble staying "in sync" with one another during a game. If they're paying less attention to what their comrades are doing, they're probably not calling exactly what the others are calling either. You want everyone calling it the same way.

Crewmembers have to establish a reputation for working to the same standard in the same situations throughout the game. Unless you can find identical triplets somewhere, it inevitably means that even the best officials have to exercise some give-and-take in their judgments to leverage their success as a crew.

Consistency from crew to crew. One of the most underestimated factors in a crew's potential for success this week is what the coaches had to put up with last week. If the officials come in and put on a completely different show than the last gang did, one crew's going to get it in the neck. Somebody in authority has to be communicating with crews and telling them how their products differ - good or bad. It's even more critical that those crews listen and adjust. A great way to get booted out of a conference is to shrug off how you differ from other crews and say, "Take it or leave it." They'll leave it.

Perhaps the right word isn't consistency but capability. In manufacturing, a consistent process is one that always gives the same result but that result isn't necessarily the one you want. A capable process is one that consistently gives the desired results. Assigners want officials who reward their confidence in them by turning in capable performances night after night.

Fortunately, capability is a quality you can develop if you're willing to work at it. And it certainly pays off when you do.

Source: Arbiter

I know we all intend to call every play on its own merits and with consistency across the game and crew. And it is more of a rookie thing and shouldn't be at this level, BUT, if you no call and then think "I should have whistled that one" after, it's natural to be subconsciously more aware to not miss the next. And even applies with a partner's call that you think "probably should have been a whistle." When you car shop for a new Ford Explorer, you suddenly notice every Explorer on the road. Not saying the 2nd foul was right, (1st was a definite miss), just speculating on what may lead to the "call the lesser foul after no-calling the worse one."

+1