As we continue the slide into the slow news/off-topic article season here at CRFF, it becomes necessary to re-evaluate everything about the sports we love in an effort to better understand why we are fans, stay entertained, and fill this front page up. In this vein, this recurring segment will be about changes that could be made to 'Merica's favorite sport, football. But before I write up some posts about rule changes, I first wanted to tackle the obvious question from the SEC fan in all of us: Why would we ever want to change the game that was invented by Jesus himself?
The answer is that we don't necessarily need or even want to change football, it is just a sport that is most based in rules and structure, and therefore lends itself to change more than any other sport. Now I don't have the official measure on this, but I once read that the rulebook for football is double the length of the rulebook for any other sport that exists... it is a game that can only work with clearly defined boundaries. To put it another way, if you dropped some eskimos, or aliens, or people from SE Oklahoma, or anyone else that lives a life completely isolated from the rest of the world into the middle of different playing fields, and gave them a 5 minute description of the sport that corresponds to the playing field, and how to play it, the group dropped on the football field would be the most confused. While the groups on the baseball and soccer fields would be actually playing their respective sports close to how they are meant to be played, and the group on the basketball court would be playing something resembling women's basketball (burn!), the group on the football field would be running in circles shoving the odd shaped ball into each others orifices. It is not an intuitive sport (and apparently I think when something isn't intuitive it leads to orifice shoving). We only understand football so well because we have seen it our whole lives, and understand most of the intricacies of the rulebook. After a 5 minute description of football, do you think those eskimos/aliens/dudes from Antlers would be anywhere close to understanding how many men need to be on the line of scrimmage, what a first down is, or even what defines a ball carrier being "down"? Doubtful.
Okay, we all get it right?.... football is very rule based and only makes sense to people that spend their whole lives watching it. While this has its detriments, the advantage is that you can keep instituting rule changes to get closer to perfecting the sport, or just for the hell of proposing them. That is what these posts are supposed to be about. What can we change to improve, spice up, reduce injuries, increase revenue, etc about the sport we love? And hey, once we get through all these changes, maybe we could re-startup the XFL, bring back "He Hate Me", and just sit back and watch hundreds of dollars roll in.