1) There's harldy a more irrational coaching practice than benching a player based on the number of fouls he's committed. While it might make sense to bench a player with three fouls in the first half, as a rule, it just doesn't make sense to take a player out of a game because you're afraid the player might have to come out of the game. Even with four fouls, you're figuring he's going to commit the fifth one at some point. Which strategy is more likely to keep him in the game, keep him in the game and hope for the best or take him out of the game and guarantee he's not on the floor contributing?

2) More support for a different timeout rule in basketball: Only one timeout allowed per team in the final two minutes of the game. Let the players play!

King touches, briefly, on the importance of luck in baseball, and I hope he will do more with this topic in a future column. I've been thinking about the luck factor more and more lately, especially watching the World Cup, because I have long felt that luck plays the biggest role in soccer, of all the major spectator sports.

Here's my list of major spectator sports, from the one where luck plays the biggest role to the one where it plays the least. I'd be interested to see other lists, with more developed explanations:

Soccer

Hockey

Baseball

Football

Basketball

While it's true that, in the end, the top teams almost always do come out on top, indicating that the final results are not all about luck, I think players, coaches and fans in all sports prefer to believe that the results of games are almost entirely based on skill, effort and coaching. I think luck plays a major roll in the results of evenly matched competitors. Someone else can do the math, but even in a seven game series (let alone a single game like the Superbowl or World Cup final)any given sequence of events happens with some kind of predictable probablility. A team strings five hits together over three outs, not because they are more skillful, are trying harder or because of a coaching decision, but because they happened to do it that day and the other team didn't.

One more brief example from soccer: In such a low scoring game, with often fewer than ten shots on goal by a team, it seems to me that the six inches that separates an exciting miss from the winning goal puts luck above and skill and effort in that particular game. Maybe, unconsciously, that's part of the reason Americans don't like soccer as much as other sports.

Hey King,

There are still some bands that march during half time at high school games, but you can tell your wife that the reason she doesn't see them often is because they are away at marching band competitions. That's the thing nowadays. When I was in high school (about when you were, King) we worked on a new show for half time every week. Now, HS marching bands work on one show for months to make it perfect, and then do that show at a series of competitions where the only people in attendance are other marching bands-- and the parents, of course. The shows are pretty cool, actually, and the routines are lot more elaborate than they used to be, but they aren't really for public consumption, unless you like going to band competitions, of course.