lazarus

Thanks greenecounty. Sounds like a pretty tough way to play out the end of a tight substate game.

Does anyone on here know what the technical was about at the end of the coalfield-north greene substate game? Leading by one and inbounding the ball with 4 seconds left, why would coalfield do something to get T'd up? It must have been something grievous to draw a technical that changed the outcome of the game.

Sometimes people just don't know what they don't know. 1) There is an official assigned to watch and see if free throws are made... the official scorekeeper. The official scorekeeper is a part of the officiating crew, and is supposed to wear an official's uniform. Unfortunately this rule is not enforced, which I believe contributes to the confusion in situations like this. 2) Outside of the State tournament (and other tournaments that are well run), the official scorekeeper is provided by the home team. This leads to somewhat inconsistent quality in scorekeeping. And scorekeeping in basketball is probably more important than in any other sport. I know that there are cases in which the head official will designate the visiting scorekeeper as the official scorekeeper, when the home scorekeeper is demonstrably unable to perform. 3) Judging by LEAD's crowd support, they are probably hard pressed to find someone to perform the scorekeeping job. It is obvious that neither the scorekeeper, nor the clockkeeper were especially good at their jobs. That does not mean they were "cheating," unless you think Eagleville's scorekeeper was in on it. 4) the score on the scoreboard is meaningless. Only the score on the official scorebook is important. It is nice, for the benefit of the teams playing, if the score on the scoreboard is correct. In this case, the score on the scoreboard did not agree with the book, and the officials correctly looked at the books and changed the scoreboard to match. To give the officiating crew credit, they checked the score on both the home and visiting books. Those agreed, so that was the score. There is a running score kept on the scorebooks, and that would be the column the officials would check. There would be no reason for them to look at the record of the two free throws, unless there was a discrepancy in the scorebooks! Had Eagleville's scorebook been correct, it would probably have gone to looking at the previous free throws, and the score would have been corrected. 5) Regardless of whether the score was correct after the two free throws, all play from that point forward was based on the official score. It is impossible to say what would have transpired after that point, except it would have been played differently. Therefore, the real injustice would be to change the final result of the game. 6) If the TSSAA were to take any action, based on this game, it should be to require a third (official) scorekeeper at all tournament games. Functioning as a team scorekeeper creates distractions for a scorekeeper. In this case the two scorekeepers were debating whether the player who fouled had 4 fouls or 5 (important in their jobs as team scorekeepers), and failed to record the two made free throws... The question would be whether there is a pool of experienced scorekeepers available to fulfill this function.

A pure stall game is not going to win basketball games very often, which is why it is so seldom employed. However, a spread out offense, designed to score (uncontested layups) like the 4-corners, can be damnably difficult to stop, when it is run well. Basketball, like most sports, can be reduced to simple mathematical equations. One winning equation is to take a lot of shots, and have more possessions than your opponent. This requires the athletes to create a lot of turnovers and offensive rebounds, or superior physical conditioning and/or numbers to wear the opponent out. Another winning equation is to get all your defensive rebounds, don't turn the ball over, and shoot a higher percentage shot than your opponents. This does not require physical superiority or numbers, just fundamentals, teamwork, and discipline. There are other approaches, and a *good* coach will choose a philosophy that suits the personnel he has available. Even the big schools do not have the luxury of picking players to fit their system, and the small schools have to be creative with a highly variable talent pool from year to year. What makes basketball fun at the high school level is seeing how these *good* coaches adapt the game to their personnel, and watching as each tries to impose their own game plan on the opponent. The shot clock has reduced college basketball to a game of run and shoot. The complex offenses and elaborate defenses that once made the game fascinating are a thing of the past. The best basketball played today is on the high school level. I would hate to lose that.

The beauty of basketball in high school is that it is the one sport where a team with significantly less athletic ability can still compete and win by having superior discipline and teamwork. A lot of that is due to the absence of a shot clock which has (IMO, while we are giving opinions) ruined the game at other levels. It does not matter how long the shot clock, the fact it is there allows a team with superior athletic ability to simply sit back in a zone and let the clock force the other team to shoot. Shot clocks take 90% of the strategy out of the game. Make it short enough, and organized games are indistinguishable from the playground. Other than making the game more entertaining for "fans" with little knowledge of the finer points of fundamental basketball, the clock serves no useful purpose.

you are way underselling the players they had. Even without the dominant post player, they still had the best talent in their district. The point guard they "settled" for might not have the size to play major college ball, but I am not sure he was not a better high school point guard than the one he replaced. I don't know anyone who thought they would not advance out of the district with the best talent of any team. It would have been hard to miss making the top 4. They had a good season, and played well together. Adjusting the game plan to match the talent is part and parcel of coaching high school ball. By and large, they beat the teams with less talent, and lost to the ones with more. There was a quality win over Ensworth, and a nonquality loss to Ridgeway. I was still sort of surprised they did not make it to the state tournament.

I saw that game. After hearing how CPA was "down" this year, I thought it might be competitive.... CPA won because they had vastly superior athletes. Just because they lacked a major college prospect in the post, does not mean they do not have far better athletes than anyone else in their district.

It will take a lot more than a couple of losses to free agency to put CPA on a talent level with the teams in the division where they are allowed to play. I am sure that can struggle by with only 5 times the talent, rather than their preferred 20 times.

Personally, I would rather see the classes eliminated. Just let the schools divide into conferences for the regular season however they wish, and only use the tssaa groupings to set up postseason tournaments... every game win and go on or lose and go home. At the end we have one state champion. The little dinky schools can play each other in the regular season, and get sent home by some powerhouse early in the tournaments... just like now. The schools that will do anything to win will be forced to form conferences with their real peers, and won't be able to divvy up a plethora of championships at the end of the season. The one best team in the state will be the state champion.

the solution is really simple. classify teams according to the population from which they draw their student body, not the school population. go by counties for open enrollment schools. multiple counties for those who bring 'em in from all over either that, or just get rid of classifications altogether, like Kentucky and allow the small schools to have their own tournament.... admitting the schools who belong. and I am glad to see that I am not the only one who has noticed that cpa is very good at blowing people out..... but very mediocre when put into a competitive situation.

i can understand it from the standpoint of the administration. That trophy case full of gold balls has to be a powerful recruiting tool. Nobody is going to care how they got them. They have to stay in the weakest class they can get away with, so they will win all the time. And this is, after all, a business. I don't get it from the standpoint of the coaches. What is the fun in playing when there are hardly any games you could lose, no matter what you do? And I don't get it from the standpoint of the top players they bring in. What is the benefit of running over outmanned opponents? Look at the big guy. He seems like a nice kid, and he has big-time talent. But, how much is AA competition going to prepare him for playing at the next level?

As far as the perception that TSSAA enforcement on recruiting is not even handed, that is how it has to be. They have no ability to investigate, no subbpoena power, and no threat of perjury. So the TSSAA is restricted to acting on the information they are freely given. This is why you see the hold ups over inconsequential players, while obvious and flagrant bending of the rules goes on unfettered. Most schools are honest and up front. As a result, those schools are administered tightly. Schools that have made the decision that winning is their number one priority, and are willing to do anything to do so, run no risk of penalties, unless someone on the inside turns them in.

sole gloria drew

Sometimes it is not as simple as this team is X amount good, and this team is Y amount good. Oliver Springs was switching up defenses in the first half, and Riverside did not seem to have that point guard who can read and diagnose defenses on the fly. With the offense in front of the opposing bench (and the opposing defense in front of their own bench) Riverside had a lot of problems getting into the right attack. I thought that, when they switched ends in the second half, things might even out. But most of the damage was already done. The Oliver Springs coach has been around, and does a real good job. I don'r know that a rematch would turn out the same way. But, yesterday, OS got the upper hand and kept Riverside trying to adjust the whole game.

cannon county was physically overmatched, being both outsized and outquicked. for much of the game, it looked like it might turn into a rout. to their credit, they sucked it up and made a good 4th quarter run. they showed the kind of desire and will to win that gets a team to murfreesboro. a run like that takes a toll, both in fouls and fatigue. and i did not think they would be able to get over the hump.... but that one play; the failure to call a walk, when a girl went up to shoot, held the ball and came down before passing. it was as bad a ref failure as you will ever see, adding the technical on top of that was overkill, and did leave cannon county with zero chance. as could be expected, the partisan fans overreacted to every subsequent call, and developed the narrative that the officials won the game. i did not see anything exceptional, besides the one really bad (and unfortunately timed) call... that said, i would have expected some latitude on the technical (usually officials know it when they really blow a call, and hate it as much as anyone) but there might not have been a choice. i did not see what the technical was for. kudos to cannon county for a gutsy performance, and to their coach for getting them to believe enough to make that run. to be honest, i thought their spirit had been broklen in the first half.

That made my day. I will have to remember it next time we stink up the gym.

i was only 10 miles from murphy when i heard the announcement. so i had to turn around and make my way all the way back... now i have to do it again in the morning, and i suspect the roads might be worse. i was there in '93. could not even get home after the games ended (the highways our of town were barricaded) and spent the night on the floor at canonsburg village.

And we think the girls were damaged by playing in a game where they were intentionally trying to lose? There are 5 pages here (and counting) that says every girl who plays has seen adults lose all perspective.

They played thru the blizzard of '93, and the highways out of murfreesboro were barricaded. There were lots of available seats.

Spare me the strident piety. By the time the girls reach this stage in their career, they have seen it all; They have seen Jr Pro drafts rigged to stack teams, grown adults (whose kids are on the same team) fighting in the bleachers, inter-school recruiting, grown adults screaming at children, parents instructing their kids and over-riding the coaches, meetings with school administrators and parents over playing time, the wild-west no-rules AAU, "Christian" schools that do anything to win gold balls, and on and on. These kids are fully aware that grown adults have blown a kids' game entirely out of proportion. They have seen excesses and abuses. They gave seen the misbehavior of gifted athletes overlooked and swept under the rug. They have seen the system gamed and the rules bent and would be hard pressed to believe that we answer to any moral standard except winning at all costs. And yet, I am supposed to believe that they have been damaged beyond repair by coaches who choose to play the tournaments the way they are set up? Even in this situation, it seems that most of the complaints are not over the game being thrown, but over it not being done more surreptitiously. As far as I am concerned guilt or innocence is not a matter of getting caught. If these coaches should be fired, or given a lethal injection at center court in Murphy Center, then so should all the dozens of other coaches who have done the same thing since this cockamamie bracketing system was put into place. It does not matter that it was done more discreetly. And so should the officials from the TSSAA, who have described this as "one incident" or "a rare occurence." At worst, they are outright lyiing, at best they are absolutely clueless about what is going on under their watch. FIX THE SYSTEM. This would all be worth it, if we took the simple steps necessary to remove the incentive to lose. Send 4 home. Give the 3-4 winner a choice of brackets. This is not rocket science. If all we do with this is crucify the coaches that got caught, and fluff our sense of righteousness by expounding about the "integrity" of the game, then nothing is gained by this unfortunate incident. Do you honestly think anyone who has devoted their life to coaching *wants* to lose a game on purpose? There is no reason for them to be placed in that position.

Integrity? They played the game the way it was set up. A flawed system made their best option an undesirable one. It does not get more real world than that. If we are going to get along in the adult world, we are going to have to do things that we find distasteful sometimes. That is how life is. They did not try to injure someone, they did not take PED's, they did not pay off officials, they did not lie, they did not do any manner of things that I would consider lacking integrity. They simply played to get to the state tournament, by the rules that exist. They did what teams do every year. It is a bad system. Every year, lots of coaches schedule games they are certain to lose. They play bigger schools, in higher classifications. They play powerful teams where they will be hopelessly outmanned. They do this because playing stronger opponents will make them better. They do it because it will give them a better chance to reach the state tournament. Does this lack integrity? They are losing on purpose, in order to reach the state. I listened to a TSSAA official on 104.5 state that this is something that rarely happens. From his position, if he does not know that it happens every year, he would have to be blind. He had to know that what he was saying was an outright lie. He was defending his employer. Is that integrity?

Yes, I do equate them. At the end of the day, I answer to myself first, for what is in my heart. What other people suspect, or whether they can prove it or not, is immaterial. If that makes me a fool, so be it. I have not been in that situation, but I will tell you that I believe that I would try not to win, if my team would benefit from a loss. But, I have learned the hard way, that what I believe I would do in a situation is sometimes very different from what I do, if I am actually in that situation. Trying to lose would be agony, because I am competitive by nature. I hope I never have to find out.

Then we should re-bracket the Regions without regard to the District touranament results. Otherwise the analogy does not fit. This also eliminates placing coaches and players in a game where the wise course of action is to lose. And that is my whole issue. I know that things got out of hand, but the basic premise was sound. You try to put your team in the best position to advance. NFL teams hold out their key players in late regular season every year. I have even suspected some of losing games, when it would place them in a better postseason bracket, or help a weaker team get in and keep a more dangerous opponent at home. The NFL did not punish coaches for playing to what a flawed system created. They moved more divisional games to the end of the season, to reduce the number of games that were better lost. It is the job of the administrative body to prevent games that are better lost.

Every team in the state is in the tournaments at the beginning. No one is being shut out. The 3-4 game is between teams that have already lost once. How many extra chances should they get?

Do you think the players don't know when their coach loses a game on purpose?