Originally Posted by Gazoo
Rick Pitino was interviewed this morning and had an interesting take. He said that back in the day officials were expected to use judgement and help create a flow of the game. For example if it was getting physical they started calling anything and everything to calm the game down, and if the game was free flowing both sides were committing the little ticky-tack fouls here and there the ref's just let it go.
He said that today the officials are much more by-the-book. If players commit 200 fouls the refs will call 200 fouls, regardless of whether or not each one of those fouls impacted the situation or the game.
I don't know if that's actually true or not, but it's an interesting thought. The replay generation has exactly what it's asked for basically.
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Actually, I would be willing to challenge Pitino on that assessment, at least a little.
"Back in the day", players seemed to try harder to avoid contact, so that "fouls called" were really "fouls committed", more often than not. I remember, a few years ago, watching a replay on TV of the 1984 Dayton/DePaul game at the Arena (The Shot). There was a play where Dallas Comegys of DePaul contested one of our guys' shots (Goodwin, maybe?). The stripes got him for a foul in the act of shooting, and when NBC went to the replay, Don Criqui said there was no question that it was a foul. My reaction while watching the replay: "Really? A foul? Not today, it isn't!"
No, today, instead of trying to avoid contact, players seem to be coached to make contact regularly in certain situations, because "they can't call everything". IMHO, it all started about the time that Georgetown's program rose to prominence in the early '80s. He!!, the old Big East (in the pre-football days) even experimented with a "6 Fouls/Player" rule, to help ensure that players could play with more reckless abandon and less risk of fouling out.
"Back in the day", guys who were built like Goodwin, Young, Colbert, Chapman, and (now-Coach) Grant could play the 3, 4, or even the 5, and succeed, because skill was a highly-valued commodity. Last night, we saw glorified hippo wrestling on display. Because "they can't call everything".
Frankly, if I wanted to watch hippo wrestling, I'd tune into ESPN87 to watch real hippos wrestle.
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