A friend once explained to me the infield fly rule as a hackneyed means of coping with a fundamental flaw in baseball. I’ve been thinking about other sports and their associated flaws, and perhaps other dopers know of some.
When I say “fundamental flaw”, I mean that the basic, elegant rules allow for some situation that requires a patched on rule to handle it.
MLB: The infield fly rule. The elegant rule is that when a ball is caught, the batter is out, but any men on base are allowed to advance after tagging up. The problem is when there is a popup to the infield, should the runners advance? If they do, and the ball is caught, they have to turn around and sprint back to their original base to tag up. If they don’t, the infielder can simply let the ball drop, pick it up and easily toss them out because they never advanced. Thus you get a patched on infield fly rule.
Soccer: Extra time. The elegant rule is that the clock never stops, but the problem is that the game sometimes does. Thus, you tack on an arbitrary amount of makeup time at the end of the game.
Football: Spiking the ball. The (not particularly) elegant rule is that you can’t throw the ball away unless you are outside of the pocket, and you must approach the line of scrimmage with the pass. The problem is that you need to be able to spike the ball to stop the clock. Thus there is a separate rule that disconnects a spike from every other pass play. (Also, you must be lined up under center – not shotgun – to be allowed to spike it.)
I’m sure there’s a bunch of others, both in the sports I mentioned and every other one. I’m guessing that Hockey and Football, in particular, are chock full of them. So, any others?
Well, I disagree with your characterization of soccer’s extra time and football’s spike rule as “fundamental flaws.”
Fundamental flaws are where the rules of the game break down and render the game no longer gamelike.
The infield fly conundrum you describe is a fundamental flaw because it removes any element of competition from the game. The runners are hosed regardless, as an effect of a reasonably expected condition (namely, a pop fly in the infield).
The extra time rule and spike rule are attempts by the league to make the game more “entertaining” and quell complaints by fans who feel entitled to 90 minutes of actual kicking and passing, or who feel gypped when a quarterback doesn’t attempt to advance the ball. These are not fundamental flaws, but cosmetic patches.
Offsides completely ruins soccer. Okay, so come up with some way to keep the offense from having a bunch of players inside the penalty box, other than that, let 'em go.
Ditto on icing the puck in hockey. Replace face-offs for fouls with the other team getting a free shot but the shooter has to face away from the goal. Those 2 things kill huge portions of games. Fighting gets you suspended from games. And while we’re at it, ditch having 3 periods. Pick 2 or 4, I don’t care.
Basketball: bring back tip-offs. And start the clock with 2 minutes left and each team has 99 points. (<-Some comic whose name I can’t remember.) But what they really need are rules that makes taking more than 2 steps or dribbling, then stopping, then dribbling again a foul.
And in all sports, each player has to wear gear from a non-sponsor. Make the hot doggers think twice: “Do a really want to a great dunk in the Other Company’s shoes?”
Pro basketball has made it worth more points to sink a basket from a greater distance (three-point line).
Inside the three point line, any basket (save foul shots) are worth two points.
Why isn’t a dunk worth only one point? I mean, if you can actually put your hand with the ball in it, into the basket; why would that shot be worth the same as a shot requiring more skill? And why is touching the rim even legal?
Yeah…I know, it’s more exciting for fans to watch a player “dunk-on” another and that’s why it’s the way it is today.
I think modern, closed course bicycle racing avoids the problem I describe below, but if you have two racers start from the same point who are going to race around in a banked course, the race starts off with a balancing contest, because it is such an advantage to be behind (lower wind resistance) another racer.
In a Carribean soccer tournament in 1994, Grenada was playing against Barbados. Barbados needed to win by two goals to advance to the next round, otherwise Grenada would. The rules in place at the time said that if the game was tied at the end of regulation time, it would go to overtime and the first team to score would be considered to have won by two goals.
With a few minutes left, Barbados was ahead 2-1. With that score, Grenada would go to the next round so they were playing a strongly defensive game.
Here’s the fundamental flaw. Barbados kicked the ball into their own net to tie the score and try to force overtime. Grenada spent the last few minutes trying to kick the ball into either goal, and Barbados was defending both.
The game went to overtime, Barbados scored and moved on to the next round.
Hockey used to allow teams to warm up a substitute goalie if he was brought in during the game. This stopped the game for several minutes while the players took practice shots at the new goalie. However, some smart coaches (Al Arbour of the New York Islanders I believe started this) would send in the backup goalie whenever they wanted to give the entire team a rest (like in the last two minutes of a tied game or to break the other team’s momentum.)
And in football (Canadian anyway, I don’t know about the NFL) I’ve seen a team purposely take a delay of game penalty to get moved back 15 yards because they were on their last down and not close enough to go for the touchdown, but close enough that the angle to kick a field goal (our posts are on the goal line, not the back of the endzone) would have been difficult. Moving back 15 yards actually helped them get a better kick.
If you reach back into history you could say the fundemental flaw in basketball was that once you had a lead it was to your advantage to hog the ball and not press the play. Simply sit back and avoid playing the game. That was until they introduced the shot clock.
Come to think of it basketball has a lot of these time rules.
On the theory that if its on ESPN it must be a sport, I think that it is completely wrong and unfair that poker players are allowed to wear dark glasses to hide their eyes.
Man, I wish I had seen that soccer game, that must have been AWESOME.
If you want to get into weird rules that screw up sports, how about all the weird things they do to judge who goes to what game in college football? I think a straight playoff is the ticket!
In football, you occasionally see a play like Bill Belichik called in Denver last year during a Monday Night Football game. IIRC, it was 4th down, and they were trailing by 4 and stuck deep in their own end late in the game. Since trailing by 4 and trailing by 6 are essentially the same thing with time running out, they snapped the ball out of the endzone, took the safety, and then got a free kick from the 20.
Or, another solution that always gets me in trouble: raising the basket height proportional to the average NBA player’s height. If Astro’s Netherlands thread teaches us anything, the dunk will eventually become a drop.
In HS and College football you are downed if your knee is on the ground. In the NFL you must be “down by contact”. College feild goal attempts the holder is always “down” so they make a rule that being down, therefore ending the play, doesn’t count for that guy unless he stands up.
How is that a flaw? You are talking about the Match Sprint, and jockeying for position is part of the skill needed to do well in that event. Even in road racing, if the finish comes down to a sprint the rider with the better position has an advantage over other riders.
On the other hand, the individual Time Trial takes the position aspect out of the game, but that’s a different event than the Match Sprint.
This is more contradictary than fundamentally flawed, but it is one that has always bothered me.
In American football, if you are running from the field into the end zone, all you have to do is to “cross the plane” of the goal line, but if you are in the end zone when you receive the ball, you must get your feet (or foot) to touch the field. A guy can have his entire body inside the “plane” of the endzone, but if he doesn’t touch his feet down, he doesn’t score.
The tuck rule is simply an incomplete forward pass. The quarterback’s arm is coming forward and the ball comes out. There’s nothing illogical about it, unless you think it should be ruled the same as intentional grounding.
I don’t know its origins, but it could have safety issues, like they didn’t want eight 300 pounders diving for a ball at the quarterback’s ankles. That’s just a guess, though.
If you want to argue about whether the call was right (it was) in the OAK-NE playoff game, that’s another thing completely.
It’s not just that you get the ball across the plane of the endzone, but that you have ball control and are in bounds while doing it. Catching the ball on the sideline but not getting both feet (or a knee or elbow or whatever) down is an incomplete pass, just like it is in the endzone. Incomplete pass=no ball control=no touchdown for you. Obviously, if you’re running the ball (either a run play or after a completed catch), you have ball control and then all you have to do is just get the nose of the ball to kiss the front line of the endzone.
I know you probably know this. I just don’t see what is contradictary about it.
I don’t see why it should be intentional grounding. Obviously, getting hit while attempting to pass creates loss of/changing momentum which creates loss of ball velocity which creates either a really bad pass that could be picked off or a short pass that might not make it past the line of scrimmage.
Of course, that whole bit is moot if the QB is outside the tackle box anyway.