Two things that annoyed me this week from the sporting world, both of which revolve around knowing the rules of the sport at hand.

The first comes form the Duke v. Southern Illinois basketball game on Thursday night.  During the game, Kyle Singler from duke got a steal and with a clear path to the basket went up and dunked it.  An SIU player, trying for the block, came from behind and hit Singler while he was in the air.  This caused Singler to flip land with his tailbone on the basket support, head below his hips, and facing back towards the court.  The SIU player clearly attempted the block and also clearly fouled Singler.  The AP write-up had this nugget:

The Salukis made things much more difficult than the final score might indicate. They pulled to 55-47 with about 9½ minutes left before Singler hit a 3-pointer. A couple of minutes later, Duke’s stellar sophomore was fouled on a breakaway dunk and crashed to the floor in a heap.

A referee came from the other end of the court to call an intentional foul on Boyle, even though it appeared the Southern Illinois forward was going for the ball. After Singler made a pair of free throws, Henderson nailed a 3 from the wing to give Duke a 66-49 lead.

The implication above is that Duke got a bogus call from the officials.  They imply that the ref with the worst view made the call and that it was wrong because the player went for the ball and therefore did not commit an intentional foul.  Now, I realize that I’m a little sensitive to this because of the perception that Duke gets all the calls.  In fact, the more aggressive team tends to get the calls, and Duke is usually more aggressive  than their opponent.  When they’re not, the call tend to favor their opponent.  Anyway, back to the call at hand… The NCAA rules and interpretations clearly says:

d. Intentional personal foul. An intentional foul shall be a personal foul that, on the basis of an official’s observation of the act, may be purposeful or reactionary and is not based solely on the severity of the act. Examples include, but are not limited to:

1. Causing excessive, non-flagrant contact with an opponent while playing the ball;

While this does point out that it’s still a judgement call on whether the act is purposeful or reactionary, it’s pretty clear that it’s okay to make the call even though the player went for the ball.  It just irks me that the AP doesn’t seem to know or care about this.  But like I said, I’m probably overly sensitive.

The second annoying story this week has been the Donovan McNabb not knowing about tie games meme.  Who cares?  The only question that needs to be asked (which I never heard) was this: Did now knowing that games could end in a tie cause you to play the game any different? If the answer is no, then what does it matter if he didn’t know the rule.  Sure, it makes him look less than awesome a knowing his choosen field of work, but that’s hardly worth all the skewering he’s taken in the media.