From a coolness perspective I’d love to have no plates, but NASCAR made the right call-IMHO they still are going a bit too fast, and I dread the day that a stock car ends up going into the stands.
Football (soccer): Get real about financial fair play. Last year Real Madrid spent over 90 million euros (I think about 120-130 Million USD) to get Gareth Bale to play for them. That is double (or maybe triple, not sure) the entire budget (for everything, not just transfers) that the team I support spends in a year. Part of this is the huge worldwide popularity of Real, but it’s also true that the Spanish FA allows teams to incur vast amounts of debt, more so than other FAs. English football is different, there you have owners bankrolling teams at massive ongoing losses. Most teams have neither of those luxuries. If the Champions League is to be meaningful as a fair competition, this sort of stuff needs to be addressed. I’m not holding my breath, though.
It’s hardly my favorite sport, but I do enjoy Olympic Curling, and there’s an obvious rule fix here. A curling match has 10 “ends” (innings) within which the two teams take turns rolling stones. In each end, the team that gets to throw the last stone (known as the hammer) has a big advantage. Ok, fine, it seems obvious then that, since there are an even number of ends, the two teams would just alternate who has the hammer so that each match is fair. Nuh-uh. Instead, possession of the hammer in the 1st End is determined randomly (or by some other method sometimes, but I think in the Olympics it’s random), and thereafter a team only loses the hammer by scoring in an end.
Long story short, lucking into having the hammer in the 1st End provides a considerable edge. It’s dumb.
Agreed. There’s lots of noise about how changing the helmets can’t stop concussions, because we’re dealing with rotational forces and it’s the impact of the brain against the inside of the skull that matters, etc. etc.
Ok, I’m sure that’s true, but I think it’s intuitively obvious that cushioning the outside of the helmets would help, especially with all those sub-concussive impacts. Just imagine yourself in a helmet, on the field. There’s a big difference between Thwack! and skoosch. Right?
That is F1 though isn’t it?
Only somewhat. F1 is still very constrained.
Speaking of F1: Let go of the Ferrari favoritism.
If these are in prior posts, I missed them.
Most of the baseball changes are rather useless attempts to speed up the game. Few if any of them will actually shave significant minutes; the long delays in a pitcher-batter duel are either because the batter is a hot-dog jerk (which tends to be self-correcting) or because the entire game is hanging on every pitch of this encounter. Get over your boredom. It’s not one of your high-speed timed-break games. Making it into one won’t reduce your lack of attention span.
Eliminate the DH - it did NOT drive pitching specialization, the whole evolution of the game in the last 50 years did. Specialty players are for football, as are time clocks, penalty flags/cards, excessive timeouts and instant replays. Nine players. All field. All bat. Period.
What baseball really needs is a severe reduction of size. Cut the leagues to no more than 12 teams each in two divisions each. No wild cards. Reduce contract limits so that players are free agents most of their career, no more than 3 season binding commitment permitted. Let fewer teams slug it out for the services of a smaller pool of truly qualified players.
Oh, and throw a season soon to give the Cubs a World Series title. We can all pretend they did it on their ownsies and fans can quit pissing and moaning every friggin’ season.
It is, but it is a constant battle for the FIA to come up with a balance between standardisation and individual engineering innovation. A tricky circle to square.
amen to that.
American Football:
-Eliminate “icing the kicker”
- Cut down on commercials.
- Eliminate coaches challenges
- reduce by 1 allowed time outs
-reduce play clock to 25 seconds - Allow Peyton Manning only one “omaha” per play.
Basketball:
Instant replay for everything. I don’t like how some plays are reviewable and some not. I actually don’t mind the pause if they are trying to get it right. But institute a rule like football where coaches can challenge a call if they don’t like it, and the refs have to go back to review it. If they win, great. If its not overturned, then the coach loses a time out
On the other hand, I do hate the TV time outs. Those should be eliminated, either the coach calls a time out or there isn’t one. Theoretically, there should be possible a game that only has 3 commercial breaks: between the quarters and at the half.
NASCAR:
Not a Nascar fan and I don’t consider it a sport, but if they want to go back to the spirit of competition between drivers and not cars, then I say have all cars be identical models kept by NASCAR. At the start of a race, drivers get randomly assigned to a car. No using your own personal car, you win with your skill and not a technological advantage
Baseball:
Get rid of the balk rule. Pitchers should be able to fake any way they can before throwing a pitch. If they want to make it look like they’re throwing at a base and then turn and throw a strike, they should be allowed to
But that’s both very close to how it is now and very far from its original spirit of competition.
NASCAR has its origins in an extended shootout between competing models of stock road cars - the name expands, or used to expand, to the rather clumsy National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. The whole point is that it’s car (and driver) vs. car (and driver). NASCAR long ago drifted away from anything like road-model cars and in recent years there are a few chassis and a few engines to choose from - the only “stock” component is the general shape of the body, which is supposed to (used to?) conform to the lines of the road version.
Until around the early 1970s, the cars WERE pretty much what you could buy, with some limited roll cages and so forth. The Chrysler Hemi was built as a (cheating) stock car dominator; Ford’s answer, the 427SOHC, was banned because Chrysler won the argument.
There are dozens of racing categories where the cars are identical or nearly so. Unfortunately, NASCAR has become one of them instead of the true model-v-model brawl it used to be.
American Football
– Widen the hash marks to about where the yard line numbers are.
– Field goal attempts to be attempted as a place kick must be taken by the last player who had possession on the previous play.
– Drop kicks (where the ball must bounce before the kick) may be attempted by any player.
That’s a recipe for utter boredom. It’s boring enough right now with the domination of Red Bull and Vettel, but at least there’s some good racing going on in the back. You give a team an edge and we’ll be back in the bad old parade-lap days when first McLaren, then Williams, and then Ferrari, were so dominant there was no point in watching the race because you already knew the outcome.
Straight formulas make the racing ostensibly even, and the difference comes down to driver skill and a team’s willingness and ability to work around the edges. Now THAT is innovation, coming up with something that doesn’t break the rules yet offers an advantage to the team that discovers it.
It’s *innovative *to find and hire the driver with the best eyesight and reflexes? And to find ways to break rules without getting caught? If you say so.
Or is it innovative to invent and develop new technologies and strategies, taking some risk that they might not work or might need further development, allowing the cars to matter as well as the drivers?
I see no real difference between your first point and your second.
Both are innovative. There is a reason for having a drivers and a constructors trophy.
F1 teams are always looking for an edge. If that means exploiting a loophole in the specs then so be it.
Forgot one, boxing:
Eliminate the whole promoter/fighter relationship. All boxers should be in a league, with rules of ascension governing them. The league has a schedule, every boxer fights X times per year, against opponents of their rank. No more ducking fights, everybody fights who they are told to fight. Injuries mean a forfeit and a mark against your record just like in other sports.
You want to fix boxing? Go fix the middle east for practice, first. 
The spirit of the competition was about the cars. Who souped up their personal cars to make it the fastest when outrunning the police who were chasing after the moonshiners?
Baseball:
Reduce the size of the batting rotation to eight batters. So you can didtch the designated hitter without forcing pitchers to bat.
As others have mentioned, limit batters to one time out per at-bat. Also, there is already a rule limiting the time between pitches. Umpires just need to enforce it.
Basketball:
FIBA, the NBA and NCAA should adopt a uniform set of rules. They should provide:
The game is 40 minutes long with 10-minute quarters.
A 30-second shot-clock.
Each team is limited to 2 time-outs per half, and there are no 20 or 30-second time outs. All time outs must be called from the bench (as per FIBA rules.) Also, a team should not be permitted to call a time out immediately following a time-out. (i.e. the ball must actually go into play before either team is allowed to call time-out again.)
Eliminate the “cylander” above the rim by adopting FIBA goaltending rules.
No alternate possession rule. The first and third quarters, and any overtime periods should start with a jump ball. The visiting team inbounds the ball at the start of the 2nd quarter, and the home team inbounds the ball to start the 4th quarter.
Shorten the overtime period to 4 minutes.
Baseball:
Eliminate the “phantom tag” at second base
Eliminate the need to appeal certain plays (runner leaving a base early, runner missing a base) - the ump should simply call the runner out when this occurs
**Basketball: **
Raise the goal 12 inches
Enforce traveling violations
American football:
Either consistently enforce or eliminate the excessive celebration rule
Stop pretending quarterbacks are made of porcelain
Hockey:
Allow players to kick the puck into the net
Let the goalies play the puck wherever they want
mmm
American football. Put a top cross piece on the goal posts. The kick needs to go through a rectangular box.