Getting rid of flops and dives.

A problem today in professional sports is the amount of faking professional athletes do in order to get a foul call from the referee. In basketball this is most common when a player is guarding another person and flops in order to get the referee to call an offensive foul on the defense. Often these flops lead to trips because a player is on the floor and puts the referee in a very hard position to determine whether contact was made or not. Similarly in soccer players dive in order to win free kicks. Often these dives have no contact at all and players scream in pain on the floor for minutes waiting for stretchers to come. Once the players reach the sidelines they are miraculously fine and come back into the game. I think this problem can be fixed relatively easily in soccer but it is a little more challenging in basketball. My proposed solutions are below:

Soccer:
Throughout the game the referee uses his intuition to call the game. If he thinks it is a foul he awards a foul and for any dive he gives the player a yellow or red card depending on the offense. What I just explained is the current way referees penalize dives. However, in addition to the real-time game reffing, each game will be visited again via instant replay. At halftime and at the end of the game. Any players who faked dives during the game will receive yellow and red cards based on the replays. Plays before halftime will take affect right away and plays in the second half will take effect during the next game. This solution does not slow down the current pace of soccer and will still allow the ref to make real-time calls. However, now players will know that they will get caught for any fake dives and penalized eventually. The new system will take several months to get used too but soon players will not be able to afford to dive. Instead of getting caught maybe 5% of the time they will be getting caught at least 90% of the time. This will clean up the game stop the fake injuries and keep us spectators from screaming at all the bad calls. The system requires no additional technology and will quickly clean up the game of soccer. Some may argue that yellow or red cards at halftime are unfair so I would be open to debate this or change the rule so that all replays take place after the game and all red and yellow cards are put forward to the next game.

Basketball:
For Basketball a similar system would be ideal but fouls are lot less significant than red and yellow cards. Also starting a player with one foul to start a game has never been seen and would receive a lot of debate from members around the league. For this reason what I think should be done is that anytime a member is taking a charge the referee should make a decision whether the play has a foul or a no-call. If the contact is minimum or incidental the referee should decide the play is a no-call, and if the contact changes the outcome of the play a foul shall be called. However, the referee does not indicate who the foul is on. Once a referee calls a foul the game is stopped in an NBA game so this rule change will not slow down game play. The referee runs over to the scorer table watches a couple replays and determines who the foul is on. If the offensive player truly fouled a offensive foul is called and if the defensive player flopped or fouled then a foul is called on the defensive player. The referee should do this on any 50/50 calls and any call that is not clearly visible. I know some people will argue that this will extend games significantly but I argue it will increase game length by a maximum of 5 minutes. First of all most games average less than 10 offensive fouls a game not counting loose ball fouls. Second the referee needs to only see 1 or 2 replays to confirm his gut call or overturn it. This system will not be perfect but will clean up flopping because players will be penalized for falling down for no reason. This will also speed up games because it will increase the amount of non-calls referees make allowing more physical contact to be acceptable. Overall this fix would be easy to implement.

I hate watching people fake injuries and flop. Players should play with a certain respect and be penalized for acting on the court.