My one year of little league was on a team in a countywide league, which meant we traveled. We went 19-1, and at least 10 of our wins were mercy rule wins. One team we hung 30 on. They were out in the field so long that one of their outfielders got subbed out in the middle of an inning because he had turned his back on the infield and started taking a leak.
Incidentally, the reason it was my only year of little league (I was 9) was because my dad had been signing me up for sports leagues, just to get me to try them out. Pee wee football I enjoyed, because I was already playing back yard football with my buddies, and flag football was easy and fun. It didn’t even bother me that my first team sucked, because I was having fun. Baseball, on the other hand, I quickly soured on because my dad didn’t do his research and signed me up to play in the competitive traveling league, rather than the local league that played all its games at the same field. Honest error on his part, he was acquainted with the manager of my team, so he signed me up without thinking about it. I didn’t really know how to even play baseball then. I was actually afraid to catch the baseball, because I wasn’t coordinated enough yet and I was constantly worrying that I would wiff on a catch and the ball would smash me in the face. Yet there I was, on a team with kids who were 10 and 11 who were really good at it, and I’m stuck warming the bench because I didn’t so much as foul tip a single pitch all season, because I suck at every aspect of the game, because I didn’t have enough practice and instruction in it, because I’m 9 and my attention span sucks and I’m afraid to get hit by the ball. That one summer ruined me on playing baseball. It wasn’t fun and I wasn’t learning how to play, so it seemed like a waste of time to me.
Good idea. Teach the kids how to throw a game or, at the least, how to manipulate the score. So much for give it your best and have a great time playing. I think it would be more embarrassing for the losing team to realize that the other team was throwing it so your team had a chance. What is the defense suppose to do, let the other team score to save the coach 200 bucks. You get arrested for that in the big leagues IIRC.
And what if you’re losing bad but not quite under the limit, and you have a grudge against the other team? You can get those guys in big trouble by deliberately taking safeties.
Y’know, not everything can, or should, be fixed with a financial incentive. Slack off lest you cost coach a few hundred? Really? Like Morgenstern said, that gets you arrested or expelled from the league in the Real World. You want a mercy rule for the young kids’ games? Then apply a mercy rule for the young kids’ games. Simply say you’ll stop a gratuituous stomping for the sake of safety and leave it at that.
FWIW the weaker teams may grow to hate being “mercied” off the field and figure that if they want to at least play whole games they had better do some scoring and defending of their own. Now, the superior teams may then be motivated to pour it on hard and fast in order to shorten the games – but some of the inferior teams may themselves perversely just stop trying as soon as they find themselves on the wrong side of a 28-point deficit. It’s a risk you take with a mercy rule: that some teams/coaches will change their play so the object of the game becomes to trigger the mercy rule.
In my son’s 6th grade youth league, if you’re over a certain weight you get a stripe on your helmet that indicates you are not allowed to touch the football. They can generally only play on the lines.
As for the mercy rule, my son’s league handles it pretty well. In fact, I encountered these rules for the first time just today. Once a team in our league is up by 28 or more points, they are no longer allowed to pass the ball or run sweeps. In fact, they also have to take out their starting quarterback. That may seem onerous but what it does is give kids whom don’t normally touch the football, like my son, a chance to do so.
My son plays defensive line, some linebacker and tight end. This is his first year playing football and he’s learning fast. Due to the mercy rule, he got his first carry as a fullback and gained a whopping one yard as the guard let his guy into the backfield immediately after the snap and he got dropped.
Still, the starting offensive players were whooping it up that my son got to carry the ball, because he never gets to. They were laughing and smacking his helmet and pads when he came onto the sideline, and my son was all smiles.
I think that’s a good way to handle it. Our team won 36-8, and the other team only scored on a kickoff return for a TD.
I have the opposite story; when I played, we didn’t have a mercy rule - and our team was down by 10 runs after five innings, but scored 11 in the sixth to win. (Well, we would have won, but the other team protested - our coach changed pitchers, then put the original pitcher back in later in the game - and it was upheld; we lost the replayed game.)
In northern California, 8-man is played only by 22 high schools - 14 in the area near the Nevada border, and 8 in the coastal area between San Francisco and Salinas. Since most youth football teams are “associated” with a high school team in the area, there isn’t much call for 8-man youth football as a result. One of the problems is, you’re supposed to play 8-man on a field where the goal lines are 80 yards apart, so the goal posts have to be set 100 yards apart, making it impossible to play 11-man football (or soccer) on that field.
9-man football is not unheard of, especially in schools in rural farming areas, since you can play on an 11-man field; it is also quite common for a school that normally plays 11-man to play 9-man games against these teams.
