As the NFL looks to revamp kickoffs in the name of player safety, FTW looks at the rules in sports that need to be changed … today.
Replay: All of it, in every sport.
Replay is the bane of our sporting existence. The spirit of the rulebook has been replaced by a video dictatorship that wastes time, kills momentum and, worst of all, is frequently inaccurate. Ideally there’d be no replay at all and we’d let officials make the same mistakes that athletes do, but we’re stuck with it. They’ve gone too far to ever come back now. With that in mind, here are a few suggestions for how to improve the worst innovation in sports:
Baseball: With the exception of balls and strikes, every umpire call has been rendered meaningless by replay. The “safe” or “out” motion (which is more important to the drama of the game than we give it credit for) is no longer decisive. On close plays, we have to check the ump’s sign, then immediately look to the dugout to see if a manager is holding out his hand like he’s trying to stop traffic, all while a coach behind him is on the phone determining whether the team should challenge or if the coach should magnanimously let the game continue. Stolen bases have effectively been ruined – the call not official until it’s checked, ad nauseam, on the monitor. Even the neighborhood play, a staple of baseball for 150 years – the one that let infielders drag their foot around second base on double plays and automatically get the call – has been affected, with replay checking the exact foot position of guys making a pivot. No one wants that. Not players. Not coaches. Not umpires. Not fans. No one.
Reinhold Matay/USA TODAY Sports
What’s most annoying is how baseball tries to trim seconds off games by getting rid of intentional walks and limiting mound visits, but has no problem letting managers spend waste 30 seconds after multiple calls per game. The fix is easy: Leave replay as is but make the challenge process like tennis. A call needs to be questioned immediately or not at all.
Basketball: Some basketball replay is okay. (Checking a two- or three-pointer and identifying the fouler, for instance.) Most replay isn’t. (Out of bounds calls, flagrant fouls, etc.) The last minute of a basketball game is long enough without officials taking three minutes to look for evidence that a ball may have glanced off a player’s ring finger. Use it for the big moments only.
Football: If the league could guarantee that spending five minutes looking frame-by-frame at five angles would bring the right call, then maybe instant replay be worth it. But they can’t, so it isn’t. Even with all the supposed failsafes of replay, officials still get calls wrong. So if the system is going to be imperfect, at least make it quick and logical. The rule: officials can look at every available angle at real speed. (Plays don’t happen in slow motion. Replay shouldn’t either.) If one sweep of the cameras doesn’t show an easy overturn, keep the play as is.
NFL: Kickoffs
A recent study said a player is five times as likely to suffer a concussion on a kickoff than on a regular play from scrimmage. And the NFL is still talking about how to save the kickoff?
What are we protecting here? Yes, kickoffs are fun. They’ve been an enjoyable part of football for almost a century. So? Hockey players taking the ice without helmets was fun too but once everybody realized how unsafe and unnecessary it was, things changed. Same goes for riding around without a seatbelt or putting a five-year-old in the front seat of a car. Our knowledge evolves and, with it, our games should too.
There were only seven kickoffs returned for touchdowns last season, which comes to about one every 36 games (or 2-3 weeks). Are those seven plays, and the handful of other long returns or turnovers, worth that 133% increase in concussions? What’s bizarre is that the NFL has been trying to legislate the kickoff out of the league for years, tinkering with the distance of the kicks and the yardage of the touchback. Why are they fighting to keep something they obviously know they don’t need? Make it official.
NBA: Late timeouts
In the final two minutes of an NBA game, a team inbounding the ball under its own basket can call timeout and move the ball to half court. That’s a free 50 feet, for doing nothing. It’s all for the sake of excitement, I get it, but putting a man on second base in the extra innings of baseball games would be thrilling too.
David Richard/USA TODAY Sports
There are plenty of ways to make sports more interesting but making a mockery of the fundamental tenets of the game shouldn’t be involved. Here’s a fix for the NBA: Make a team inbound the ball before allowing them to call that same ball-moving timeout in the final two minutes. Then make them inbound again from half court. Two forced inbounds sounds like a good compromise for some unearned court position.
Soccer: Penalty shootouts
There’s nothing worse than when teams pour their hearts into a scoreless 120-minute tie and the game is halted, to be settled by an oft-arbitrary round of penalty kicks. It’s sad. Just think of all those fans deprived of dozens of more minutes without any goals. This rule doesn’t happen in every tie game, only in the important ones, which makes it even worse. A World Cup final being decided by PKs is like ending the World Series with a Home Run Derby. I’ve heard the argument that it’s too exhausting for players in tournaments to stay on the field longer than two hours, as if that’s some magic number and as if they shouldn’t be punished for failure to win a game in a reasonable amount of time. But that’s nonsense anyway. Tennis players who have two days between four-hour matches in the blistering heat would like a word.
NFL: The out-of-bounds kickoff recovery
This might happen once a season, if that. And it’s great when it does because it means a player is cognizant of the rule book enough to make a split-second decision that nets his team 35 yards. The rule is this: If a kickoff is in play (and could thus be recovered by the kicking team), the ball is considered to be out of bounds if the returner who first touches it is also out of bounds. Doing so makes it the same as if the kick had sailed out of bounds on the fly. In the screenshot above, Green Bay’s Ty Montgomery saw the ball check up on the two-yard line, scurried out of bounds, set his feet and then fell on the ball. It’s not a bad rule, per se, it’s just like many on the NFL books that seem to have been constructed without much thought and leave the league open to a potentially disastrous end-of-game situation, a la the Tuck Rule.
Tennis: On-court coaching
It’s been a decade since on-court coaching was introduced into women’s tennis and it’s still as appalling and insulting as it was back then. The practice implicitly sends the message that women need the crutch of a coaching visit while men, who are stronger, do not. Nonsense on all accounts.
On-court coaching fundamentally changes the unique individuality of tennis. There aren’t any teammates, coaches, caddies or someone waiting in your corner. It’s you and the opponent. Seventy-five feet apart. No clock. The addition of a coach, for however short a visit, alters that solitary dynamic that makes the ups and downs of tennis some of the most dramatic in sports.
Thankfully, the Grand Slams appear to have no plans to add on-court coaching for either women or men, a move that should theoretically make the WTA want to ween itself off the on-court visit. Then again, logic has never been the organization’s forte.
NFL: The fumble out of the end zone
Countless words have been written about this rule, which says that when the offense fumbles a ball into the end zone and it goes out of bounds, possession changes and the defense receives a touchback. It’s inane. It a ball goes out of bounds at the one-yard line, the ball stays at the one-yard line. Why should the ball crossing the goal line be such a big deal that it results in a loss of possession? A 10-yard penalty and loss of down should be enough of a deterrent for the offense.
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