At least in modern times, there’s no doubt in my mind this is the thread winner. There has never been a worse rule change in a major North American pro sport in terms of the immediate and profoundly negative effect it had on the quality of the sport being presented to the public. The fact that he 1999 Stanley Cup Final result is tainted for all time was the icing on a very horrible cake. Incessant video reviews and the disallowance of a bazillion goals had slowed the game down and damaged its pace dramatically, and quite literally overnight; it was an instant change and entirely for the worse.
Yeah, the skate in the crease rule absolutely wins, unless we get to count the idiocies that the IIHF has come up with. Puck hits the goalie in the mask? Blow the play dead. Offensive player enters the crease? Blow the play dead.
This raises an interesting question: now that the skate-in-the-crease rule is obsolete, will the winning goal in the 1999 Stanley Cup eventually (say, in 40 years) be thought of as not at all controversial? That is, will hockey fans of the future fail to grasp the problem with it, as a whole? When ESPN SportsMillenium shows the goal and the commentator explains that it was wrong because all the other goals scored with a skate inside the crease had been called back, will people be shocked?
(I hope I’m explaining my question well enough here…)
Actually the attendance was pretty horrible, the average never broke 15k and broke 10k only 8/17 seasons. Sure the Cosmos drew well, but they had freaking Pele and Beckenbauer.
Goalie interference is called when… the goalie is actually interfered with. :eek: Shocking, I know.
To be more specific: “Goals should be disallowed only if: (1) an attacking player, either by his positioning or by contact, impairs the goalkeeper’s ability to move freely within his crease or defend his goal; or (2) an attacking player initiates intentional or deliberate contact with a goalkeeper, inside or outside of his goal crease. Incidental contact with a goalkeeper will be permitted…”
NHL Rule 69
The “in the grasp” rule in the NFL is still in the books, but is now very, very rarely invoked, such that some people think it was repealed.
In 1963 MLB changed the strike zone a few inches top and bottom to curb the offenses. I suppose you could say that it worked in that it sure as hell curbed the offenses. In 1968 Carl Yastrzemski won the American League batting title with a whopping .301 batting average, to this day the lowest batting average to lead either league. That was the fabled Year of the Pitcher, where Denny McLain won 31 games (the last 30-game winner in MLB), Bob Gibson had an incredible 1.12 ERA, and both won their league’s MVP and Cy Young Awards.
Prior to the next year they dropped the mound height by five inches and reverted to the pre-1963 strike zones.
I think we can all agree that it was a rule change that failed miserably in that it didn’t level the competitive balance, it simply switched it from one side to the other.
Even worse than the tie, was having to listen to the bullshit about how “Baseball is different. Baseball players actually CARE about their All-Star game! It’s not just a beauty contest.” WTF?!?!?! That’s exactly what it is.
Wasn’t the rule chance that the clock started immediately before the kick? That was incredibly stupid, and allowed the above the happen. That was in an effort to speed the game up, and included a few other ridiculous adjustments that fucked with the general time management strategy of the game. How about, say, reducing the number of TV timeouts the network is allowed to call?!?
That may have been part of it, but I remember there was some kind of penalty that the receiving team couldn’t decline, so the kicking team could just keep kicking off, and run out the clock.
I have been predicting for several years that sooner or later we will have a horrific accident at a motor racing event which will kill dozens of spectators, making Le Mans 1955 look like a walk in the park, and forevermore changing the face of motorsport. You may recall Bobby Allison’s catapulting wreck along the fence at Talldega in '87, the event which prompted the use of the restrictor plates, but there was also Mario Andretti’s wreck at Indy when he was testing one of this team’s cars, where he literally came within inches of clearing the fence in the south chute. Murphy’s Law definitely applies, even though we have made tremendous strides in driver safety, esp. since Dale Earnhardt’s death in 2001.
Should I bring up the DH rule?
D&R
Good answer, but how could they possibly put a Halo rule in effect on a kickoff? Doesn’t that make onside kicks illegal? Unlike punts, kickoffs are live balls. Any player on the field is allowed to jump on a kickoff and they get possession. (Kicking team can’t advance it, though.) Punts don’t work that way; the defense can’t gain possession unless the ball is first touched by the receiving team. So on a kickoff, where the kicking team has just as much right to the ball as the receiving team, how could you have a Halo rule?
And a quick nitpick; Punts aren’t dropkicks. In a dropkick, the ball bounces off the ground before it gets kicked.
I’m not a huge hockey fan, but I’m curious exactly how the trapezoid rule is a major factor in this. Teams have always employed the “dump in” and it’s always resulted in a race to the puck against the back wall. Whether or not the goalie is allowed to play the puck in the corner seems irrelevant. Certainly in the cases where a goalie is the first to get there it eliminates the collision but there were lots of occasions before the trapezoid rule where the goalie didn’t or couldn’t play it and the race and subsequent collision was there anyways. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that it increased the number of times that there was a collision, but the collisions are a result of the offensive strategy not the trapezoid rule. The fact that the trapezoid rule was created as a response to the strategy pretty clearly shows that it was well entrenched prior to the rule.
I might argue against this as an answer to the OP simply because it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do, make the All Star game have meaning. I agree with the majority who think this is an incredibly stupid rule with dubious goals, but it’s achieving the goals exactly as intended. No unintended consequences there, just stupid intended ones.
Beat me to it.
I agree that Bobby Allison’s crash was horrifying and dangerous both to him and the fans, but it is my understanding that in the newer cars, at least in NASCAR, that getting airborne to that extent is not possible. The real danger is too many cars going fast all close to each other. Cars are going to get loose. A single car crashing into a SAFER barrier will cause the caution to come out for a few laps, a single car getting loose and causing a chain reaction and taking out 20 cars is going to get someone hurt.
As a testament to the safety, look at Michael McDowell and his big crash during qualifying.
While I’m on the subject, I don’t personally like the “Lucky Dog,” but I do agree that it makes the race safer.
SSG Schwartz
The only way I can possibly respond to this is to say that when Ellis Dee is stumped about a football question, it’s safe to assume I’m double-stumped.
I suspect the difference is that a significantly larger number of plays attract the attention of multiple skaters in those areas now. The idea being, it’s always dangerous to have a bunch of people shoving each other around trying to get at the puck down there, and anything that increases the likelihood of that happening, causes more injuries than it’s worth.
While I don’t like the lucky dog rule, it does make for some exciting racing for the cars vying to be the first car a lap down.
Like you, I love green flag pit stops, and I also find a fuel mileage race interesting. The big crashes at restrictor plate races seem to turn the whole race into a crap shoot (is there a better term?). So the sooner they drop the restrictor plate, the better.
For the record, I believe I count as a true soccer fan, but I think hockey-style shootouts was a positive rule change that should have been universally adopted. No more random than penalty kicks, but much more interesting and more relevant to overall soccer skills.
And I don’t think which way the clock runs is particularly important.
I believe that’s why kickers always bounce onside kicks rather than flying them. If the ball doesn’t bounce, then fair catch/halo rules would apply.
Canadian note :D: This is different from CFL rules, and in the CFL onside kicks are usually kicked to fly to the sideline without a bounce.
I think the counterpoint was, though, that since skaters have always chased each other for the puck, the problem always existed. The trapezoid rule was created to reduce a problem of very recent vintage - super-mobile goalies that made the dump-and-chase difficult, resulting in less scoring.
The solution to icing injuries, I hate to bring up again, is no-touch icing.