The Game Of Football Filled With Interesting Rules
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Roger Grossman-
Whether you like the game of football or not, no one can dispute that the image of the game of football is under siege.
It has filtered down from the National Football League dealing with domestic violence issues and arrested players to college players trying to unionize because they don’t get paid to the low-level evacuation of participants at the high school level because players (and/or their parents) are afraid of the long-term damage caused by playing it.
We all get that.
The IHSAA has worked hard to address many of the issues that have risen up against the sport of football here in Indiana, but there is only so much they can do as an organization to help grow the game here.
Commissioner Box Cox has said on two different occasions on a segment that we air on both WRSW and News Now Warsaw before our football broadcasts that one thing the assistant commissioners and the football coaches of Indiana are going to have to address is blowouts in football.
Cox says that the number of games with margins-of-victory of over 40 points is growing. It used to be that you would see an occasional 63-0 score, and now we see them at least once a week with a lot of 56-6 and 59-0 scores to go with it.
One team is clearly better than another, and while it’s rare that coaches in 2018 intentionally go out of their way to score points for the purpose of heaping embarrassment on an opponent, it does happen – and it’s not cool.
Cox says the football coaches of our state are going to have to join them in a conversation that will probably make some of them bristle – the establishment of a “mercy rule.”
The “Mercy Rule” has been in place in baseball and softball for a long time and its purpose is clear and it works. In high school baseball and softball, if five or six innings of the game are complete and one team is 10 or more runs ahead of the other, the game is over. In some youth leagues and adult slow-pitch softball leagues, there are also three-inning (20 runs) and four-inning (15 runs) mercy rules in place.
The concept is to hasten an end to a game where the losing team is so far behind that it’s virtually unthinkable that they could come back to win and it’s in the best interest of everyone involved to make it stop.
The commissioner admits, however, that they don’t really have a specific plan in mind to implement in high school football. And he has no plan in mind yet for a simple reason: there is no simple solution to this.
One, the IHSAA must have the coaches on board with the concept of a mercy rule or it won’t fly. And there are coaches in the state who are going to scoff at the idea of the need for a mercy rule. Their argument will be “what are you teaching kids by implementing a mercy rule in a sport like football?”
Their other argument would be that the fourth quarter of a game that is lopsided still has value to coaches and players on both sides because it gives varsity playing time to kids who usually only play in JV games.
Valid point.
So when this happens, and based on what Bobby Cox has been saying he would like to see this happen soon, you are likely to see a point differential threshold and a certain time or times of the game established at which the mercy rule kicks in.
For example, Team A goes into halftime leading 40-0. When they come out to start the third quarter the referee would tell both teams that the mercy rule was going to be in effect. Or maybe it’s 40-0 at halftime and 30-0 after three quarters.
Whatever that score and time may be, the natural solution is to use a running clock for the remainder of that game. In a “running clock” scenario, most of the normal things that would cause the stop to clock would no longer have that effect. Incomplete passes and first downs would be the most obvious, but you could add penalties and change of possession and other things to that.
I don’t ever foresee a path to stopping a game early because of an uncompetitive score. I suppose it’s possible that the trailing coach could be offered the opportunity to call it a night at the end of the third quarter if he chooses to based on the score. But I don’t see a game automatically stopped when the score goes from 49-0 to 55-0.
You could also say that only players on the leading team who had not played in the game to that point would be allowed to play after the mercy rule criteria were met. But that would be impossible for the game officials to keep track of, and equally impossible for smaller schools who have less than 30 guys on their roster.
Regardless, it’s time to have the conversation. I hope the coaches’ association has a collective open heart and open mind in that discussion. Yes, there will be some who will fold their arms and yell “NEVER!” However, the game is changing and so is the makeup and mindset of those who coach it.
