Across the sport of basketball, foul rates have been dropping for years. Whether you're watching Division I, the NBA, the WNBA or all of the above, the story has been essentially the same. You are now seeing fewer fouls being committed than you witnessed early this century.
Speaking of sport-wide trends that span genders and the collegiate-professional divide, the drop in fouls is possibly related to the growing prevalence of 3-point attempts. It stands to reason that you'll see fewer fouls when teams are less focused on pounding the paint on offense.
There is however one prominent exception to this rule. While attempting a normal number of 3s, the SEC has been the most foul-prone major conference in each of the past five seasons. During that same time span, the league has finished in the top five nationally for foul rate four times.
Last season, while the other five major conferences collectively posted a lower foul rate than they had the previous season, the Southeastern Conference went in a different direction. The SEC's free throw rate (FTA/FGA in league games) increased by a notably robust 14%. The only league in the nation that posted a higher free throw rate in 2019-20 was the SWAC. Barely.
How has the SEC remained so impervious to the winds that are blowing through an entire sport? In order to address this question, it helps to recall how we got here in terms of free throw rates.
The NCAA's 2013 experiment on fouls
Before the 2013-14 season, the NCAA men's basketball committee voted to move a series of defensive violations from literally the back of the rule book (Appendix III: Officiating Guidelines) to a more prominent position within the sport's guiding publication. The result was an unmistakable jump in foul rates nationwide for one season only.
Doubling down on enforcing the rules as written had both good and bad results. The good news was that scoring increased, which was important because the number of points being put on the board was a major concern in the middle of the previous decade. The bad news was the rise in scoring was achieved, in part, by teams shooting more free throws. While "increased scoring" sounds like a good thing, free throws are boring to watch in isolation and reliably maddening when occurring in abundance.
Fans want fouls penalized, of course. But more than this, fans want teams to not foul, period. Whether this is actually happening in conferences with normal-to-low foul rates will always be in the eye of the beholder. It is, however, one ideal.
Meanwhile, the NCAA addressed its scoring worries more directly by eliminating the 35-second shot clock and introducing a 30-second clock before the 2015-16 season. With the new clock, tempos accelerated in Division I and scoring increased from 67 or 68 points a game to 72 or 73 in the 30-second era.
Today, the college game has arrived at a point where, on average, you'll see one free throw for every three tries from the field. While that's certainly not the only imaginable ratio (free throw rates are even lower in the NBA and WNBA), it does represent something of a hard-won achievement. It also furnishes a stark contrast to the foul-happy sport of 2013-14.
Then there's the SEC.
A consistently foul-prone league
The free throw rate that Division I's 32 conferences posted in league play back in 2013-14 (0.403) is pretty much what we saw in SEC games last season (0.395). The most foul-prone team in league play in 2019-20 was South Carolina, which recorded an opponent free throw rate of 0.571. Missouri wasn't far behind (.559).
Obviously, a high free throw rate stems directly from officials blowing whistles. It's not equally clear, however, that referees assigned to SEC games, consistently lamented though they might be, are truly the primary culprit here. Terry Oglesby, Michael Stephens, Jeffrey Anderson, Keith Kimble and Doug Sirmons were all ranked in the top 10 nationally in Ken Pomeroy's Officials Rankings for 2019-20, and collectively, those five officials made 28 appearances at SEC games last season.
While it's conceivable that SEC officials blow an occasional whistle that should have been silent, an additional noncontradictory possibility is that the league's style of play is itself different. In head coach Frank Martin's eight seasons, for example, South Carolina has been one of the 50 most foul-prone teams in the nation seven times (based on all games).
This is the Gamecocks' preferred style on defense, and, to the extent that other coaches are influenced however subtly by Martin, it might be because he did reach the 2017 Final Four. So too did Bruce Pearl with Auburn in 2019, also with a high foul rate.
The major conferences are diverging
Of course, influence isn't cause and effect nor is it irresistible. Florida under Mike White and Texas A&M under both Billy Kennedy and Buzz Williams are but two examples of SEC teams that have consistently played low-foul defense over the past five years. You can record a low opponent free throw rate even in the SEC; it just so happens that a critical mass of programs prefers not to do so.
This preference marks the SEC as different. Last season, the variance in free throw rates across the six major conferences clocked in at easily its highest point in the past 19 years. This was driven not only by the SEC but also by the low level of foul calls in Big Ten games. Yet even the Big Ten was much closer to the Division I average than was the SEC.
In a sport where free throws are becoming less frequent, the SEC is forging its own path and still recording roughly two shots at the line for every five from the field. This state of affairs appears to be more of a coaching choice than a byproduct of overzealous referees. The SEC is quite simply playing its own brand of basketball -- and could well do so again in 2020-21.