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I'm officially anti-foul out

I've been trending this way for a while, but it's now official: I'm anti-foul out in basketball. After pondering about it some more, I think it may be the stupidest rule in all of sports, especially if a game goes to overtime.

In what other sport does a player get kicked out for committing five or six potentially minor infractions? In what sport do fans pay good money to watch the officials kick out a star player over watching said star player? If the goal of a season is to discover which team is the best, how is it then logical to kick out the best players because they lightly tapped an opponent on the wrist 5 or 6 times during the course of a game? Can you imagine if New England Patriots MVP Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady got kicked out of a playoff game because he was responsible for 5 or 6 false start and/or delay of game penalties? Ridiculous, right? That's how stupid the foul-out rule is in basketball.

Fouls aren't objective. While referees may be professionals and get paid a hefty sum for their work, they're human, and due to that, they make mistakes. How many times have we seen a borderline charge/block call go the opposite way we were thinking and result in a key player fouling out? In football, what would we be saying if an offensive lineman got kicked out for committing his 5th or 6th borderline holding call? Yes, the guy would be hurting his team with the penalty yards, but should he be ejected on top of that? Eh, no.

The foul-out rule is at its most ludicrous when games go to overtime. College basketball games last 40 minutes (no, I'm not accounting for commercials, timeouts, and halftimes). Players foul out when they reach number 5. So, on average, a player has to commit a foul once every 8 minutes of gametime to foul out. In the 2009 Big East tournament, Syracuse and Connecticut played a game that went into not 1, not 2, not 3, not 4, not even 5, but 6 overtimes. Overtimes last 5 minutes a piece. In other words, in this game, there were 30 additional minutes played to the 40 in regulation, totalling 70. Even though the game nearly doubled in length, the rule stayed at 5-and-you're-out. So, in this game, a player had to average a foul every 14 minutes to foul out. Yes, by the time this contest was over, so many players had fouled out, 70-year-old head coaches Jim Boeheim and Jim Calhoun were playing point guard for their respective teams.

Games, teams, and players shouldn't be defined by minor infractions. It's not what fans want; what players want; what coaches want; or what television executives want. There's a reason the foul out rule doesn't exist in any other sport. To put it eloquently, it sucks.

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