Fouling Out: The Affect on the Integrity of Basketball

A notable characteristic of people is their ability to become numb to issues they believe they have no control over. We feel this every day when we fill up at the gas pump, or when we look at our paychecks and see the amount taken out for taxes. Some things we just accept as “the way things are” and move on.

Unfortunately, this state of mind seems to have seeped into our enjoyment of sports…and for some reason, that feels more egregious than either of the previous examples. The problem is that we accept that the potential for a player to “foul out” of a game is just part of the rules, and we simply have to accept the implications of the rule. I believe we need to question the issue.

I watched the entirety of the Louisville/Wichita State game yesterday and am pretty surprised that the jump ball call at the end of the game is the only piece of officiating getting any attention. The entire game was called very tightly, resulting in 43 personal foul calls, 13 more than the Michigan/Syracuse game.

Players like Cleanthony Early, Malcolm Armstead and Ron Baker along with Louisville's Chane Behanan, Wayne Blackshear and Gorgui Dieng dealt with foul trouble throughout, and while the game was still exciting, I can't believe that these players being forced to worry about fouls helped the game in any way.

The number of fouls does get tiresome, breaking the pace of a game, but the real problem is the risk of losing game integrity. What is the true cost of all of these fouls?

Blue Chippers Riding the Bench

Going back to the days when I first fell in love with college basketball, my favorite college was the University of North Carolina and my favorite player was No. 15: Vince Carter. The guy was a phenomenal college player and I looked forward to every chance I got to watch him play. 

I remember the most frustrating thing to me was when he would pick up a second or third foul and be relegated to riding the bench.  Watching Elton Brand, Shane Battier and Steve Wojciechowski run wild while my favorite player rode the bench in “foul trouble” was frustrating to an extreme extent.

Should this be possible?  Isn’t the point of sports to put one team’s best players against another teams’ in order to decide who wins the day? 

I understand that a player should not be allowed to foul too much and that it isn’t unthinkable that a rule should be put in place wherein a player can foul out after fouling excessively, but I have a hard time believing that the NCAA’s five and NBA’s six are really excessive totals in what should be a reasonably physical sport.

What is a foul?

The most laughable aspect of the entire issue is the objectivity of the foul call. After last night’s game, one of the analysts commented that the officials began by calling the game “tight” in the first three quarters and then loosening their calls toward the end of regulation. Basically this means that each official is granted the opportunity to define for themselves what a foul is in that particular game. 

Last night, early on in the Louisville/Wichita State game, it almost seemed that every time a defender touched an offensive player, a foul was called; and the player who was accused of the call was one foul closer to being on the bench for an extended period of time and one-fifth closer to fouling out entirely.

I don’t believe that players should have to feel out how the officials are going to call the game by risking sacrificing playing time.

The Cost

The bottom line is that the potential for fouling out adds nothing to basketball. Who wants to see it? We want to see the best players have every opportunity to win the game for their team.  There is no pride in beating a team, in part, because one of the team’s best players rode the bench due to foul trouble.

We always hear about how a good official is an official who goes unnoticed. The truth is that the best officials are the ones who ensure that the integrity of each game is upheld, and the issue of “foul trouble” risks a great deal of that integrity.

We want to see the best against the best. Any true sports fan will tell you that they do not want to see their team win because the other team’s best player was in foul trouble. That makes for terrible trash talk and weakens your argument when you do want to talk about how much better your team is than their opponents.

Another cost is what I call the “back of the jersey” foul. This is more prevalent in the NBA than in collegiate play, but it occurs when the name on the back of a player’s jersey influences how the officials call fouls. This has been happening for a long time and is not likely to change any time soon. Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan joked about it and it continues to happen today, most notably with LeBron James.

I can’t say that I expect this to change, but I certainly don’t think that a defender should be closer to fouling out just because they happened to be defending a player with a marquee jersey. 

Solution

The ultimate point in all of this rambling is that we want to see the best players on the court as long as they can go. There is no need to change technical foul or flagrant foul rules, but in today’s basketball, where there are games in which it seems that a whistle can get blown every time down the court, the foul-out rules need to change.

I actually could understand keeping the potential of fouling out in the rules, but the number should be closer to 10 or 12.  I’m sure people will postulate that this will just allow players to foul more aggressively and without hesitation, but offensive players have become so adept at scoring while getting fouled and the potential for the bonus for double bonus should still greatly discourage players from fouling too much. To me, it is a better option than having a high-caliber player on the bench or playing timidly, trying to avoid fouling out.

The rule committees should either increase the number of fouls it takes to foul out or completely eliminate the possibility, finding another way to penalize teams for fouling excessively. Just leave the players on the court and let them decide the outcome.

Conclusion

There really is no more objective call in all of sports than a basketball foul. It just seems odd that such a grey area would have such a definite and potentially costly impact on a game. 

In the NFL, a player does not risk losing playing time because they interfere with a pass or because they jump offside. In baseball, a pitcher is not benched because he beans a player.  For a player to have to lose time for something that is nearly unavoidable should defy how we understand sports to work. As suggested in the introduction, I believe we have simply become numb to it and accept it as part of the game.

It just doesn’t seem right that a player may risk losing time on the court for playing aggressively. For people like me, who remember basketball in the 90’s, a little added aggression in the game would not be a bad thing.

Ultimately, just leave the players in the game and let them decide the outcome. Nobody cares about the coaching “strategy” of dealing with foul trouble. We want to see our favorite players play as much as possible and an official’s trigger happiness on the whistle should not cost us that opportunity. Perhaps the players in foul trouble last night would not have helped change the outcome, but when determining something as black and white as winners and losers, can we really accept that much of a grey area?