This has happened to me a number of times. I'm watching a game - basketball, soccer, etc. - and a player commits a foul. One of the announcers then says, "That was a good foul." The other announcers usually agree with that, and the game goes on.

I have a problem with this. I don't have a problem with fouling; during the course of a game, players will, intentionally or unintentionally, break the rules. The problem I have is with the understanding, shared, it seems, by pretty much everyone I've talked to about this, that there are good fouls and bad fouls.

A foul is breaking the rules. Many times I have heard commentators say something like, "If he's going to do that, don't do it right in front of the ref." Or, as mentioned above, "That was a good foul."

The notion that, if you are behind in score or if you are not in the ref's line of sight, it is not only OK to break the rules, its a good thing, is not something we should be teaching our children. I have been in more than one conversation with men who played sports in high school or college who said, "My coach told me if I wasn't breaking the rules, I wasn't playing hard enough." Nods all around the room from others who heard the same message. Breaking the rules not only being tolerated, but encouraged.

These same children who are being taught this by adults they respect and by their role models in sports are expected to somehow understand that this way of thinking only applies to some rules, not to all of them.

A basketball player, playing to the limits of his or her ability, will sometimes miscalculate their own speed or direction or the intentions of their opponent, and as a result will commit a foul. Its part of the game; its understandable.

I just wish they wouldn't call it good.