NCAA Football Georgetown Basketball

Davidson eliminated Georgetown from the NCAA Tournament yesterday in large part because Georgetown center Roy Hibbert fouled out after playing just 16 minutes.

On ESPN Radio this morning, Dick Vitale made an impassioned plea for a rule change that would keep that from happening: Vitale wants the NCAA to get rid of the rule that says a player is disqualified from the game after five fouls. Here's what Vitale said:

"I really think basketball, we're the only sport where a player is penalized, and put out of a game with a whistle. And you take your star player who you prepare all week with, you work, you develop your offensive, defensive schemes, all of a sudden, boom boom, two fouls, he's out of the game.

"Hibbert played 16 minutes in the game. Vital player for Georgetown. I'd like to see a rule where a player can stay on the floor, at the coach's discretion, and every foul after the fifth is two shots and the basketball if he fouls, you get two shots and the basketball. ... Think about it. Basketball is the only sport where a guy is disqualified because a guy blowing a whistle controls the whole scenario."

I dunno. The rule that says players foul out after five (or six) fouls is so ingrained in the way I think of the game of basketball that I feel like there must be some good reason not to get rid of it. I wouldn't mind seeing some teams experiment with this rule in early-season games, but I'm not convinced that we want to eliminate something as fundamental as fouling out.

An interesting piece talking about the Big East revenue distributions (via Big East Basketball Report).

While the Atlantic Coast Conference recently awarded its 12 schools an average of $10.85 million for the tax year ending June 30, 2006, the Big East awarded its eight full members an average of $5,842,599.

The Big East average has fallen for the last three years. For the July 1, 2003, to June 30, 2004, reporting period, when Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College were still members, the average was $6,794,029.

After the ACC's raid, six Big East schools (including BC, but not Tech nor Miami) received full football-basketball share averages of $6,445,968.
...
Overall, the Big East's total revenue went from $74,800,951 in 2003-04 to $62,641,685 in '04-05 to $75,411,511 in '05-06. So over the tumultuous three-year period, the league's revenue increased - but only $610,560 in a healthy sports atmosphere.

Some of the fluctuation, though, had to do with television and radio rights fees earned by the league. In 2003-04, the Big East made $25,910,626 in fees. In '04-05, after the defections, it dropped to $15,349,543 before rebounding to $19,225,441 this past reporting period.

There was never any doubt that for the first few years after the revised Big East, that the football revenues from TV would be down. The first year after everything that happened was simply about trying to remain part of the BCS coalition.

It could be argued that only a few of the football schools took significant revenue hits in the first couple of years. Half the football schools were coming into a new conference.