UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

cOLUMBIA

INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS April 7 1945

Drs F..C. Altes,
University of Kansas,
Lawrence, Kan.

Dear Phog:

Since my return from New York I have taken all spare time to fulfill
an assigment to revise and standardize the code of visual signals for
Officials, and haven't had a chance to report to you, as promised, on the dis-
cussion and action concerning your proposal to treat all personal fouls with
the technical foul regulations.

In your letter of March 22 you commented, "I dare say that the rules
committee will pay no attention to any of mine and to the majority of other
suggestion’.

As a matter of fact our whole meeting was concerned almost entirely
with suggestions given by youx and others. Among these were the reports of
interested groups including the Coaches Association, the Officials Associations,
The Y.M.C.A., and the Canadian groups. in addition, every suggestion written
on the ouestionairres and letters from individuals (every one of them) was
listed, read to the committee, and discussed. We were in session 16 hours and
spent about one of these on business sessions,- the rest were on the rules.

Among these communications was your letter which I read in whole;
thergave my digest as outlined to you. In the related discussion which was
about 30 minutes long the committee voted by a large majority to leave the
personal foul regulations alone. They were guided in this by the result of
the questionnaire vote which resulted in 1,083 believing that the present
foul regulations are satisfactory as against 123 who desired changes. Even
though one thinks that coaches, officials and administrators don't know what
is good for the game I don't see how any elected representatives can slap a
majority like that in the face.

Your guess that the committee would refuse to reduce the number of
personal fouls from five to 4 was correct. Here are some interesting statistics
on which the committee based this refusal.

1. Average number of fouls called in 800 high school games:
1939 - 20.8 fouls

1943 - 24.1 fouls—-an increase of 3. a fouls per game
1944 - 27.5 fouls - an annual increase of 3.4 fouls per game.
-19§5 ~— 29.1 fouls - an annual increase of 1.6 fouls per game.

(The 5 foul rule was in effect only in 1945)

2. Reports from 923 high school games in 1944 and 1,261 such games in
1945 (not the same games as listed in 1) showed a standard deviation
of 1.64 fouls per game.

3. Reports from 250 college games in 1944 compared with 260 college games
in 1945 showed an average increase of l. 1 fouls per game.