By last year's NCAA final, I'd had enough. Memphis couldn't make free throws, so they lost. Not that I really cared about Memphis, per se (hated Kansas is more accurate), but it was the perfect example of how any reasonably close basketball game will inevitably degenerate from a back-and-forth, entertaining affair into a silly free throw shooting contest. Suddenly the team that couldn't defend all game doesn't have to and can rely, as Kansas did, on one particular weakness in one particular area of the other's game, one that up to that point obviously didn't matter.I guess this doesn't really happen in the NBA because those guys just make their free throws (save for the few instances where they don't; see Hack-A-Shaq, Hack-A-Ben-Wallace). And of course the college guys should just make them too. But it's unsatisfying to see a game decided in the last 2 minutes based on a skill largely irrelevant to the way it was played for the preceding 38 minutes - a bit like when soccer games go to penalty kicks.
So here's my solution: call the fouls for what they are, intentional fouls, and give the other team two shots and the ball.
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