{"id":3899,"date":"2010-12-01T02:01:17","date_gmt":"2010-12-01T06:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thehogs.net\/blogs\/?p=3899"},"modified":"2016-12-29T05:35:06","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T09:35:06","slug":"rule-tinkering-bad-for-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-hogs.net\/blogs\/2010\/12\/01\/rule-tinkering-bad-for-football\/","title":{"rendered":"Rule Tinkering&#8230; Bad for Football"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is NOT about the Redskins loss to the Detroit Lions&#8230; they did not deserve to win that game&#8230; while there were bad calls that influenced the outcome, a good team does not let the game fall into the hands of the officials to begin with.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s probably happened for much of the league&#8217;s history, but sometime, probably in the early 70&#8217;s, the league decided that NFL offenses needed help.\u00a0 Rather than waiting for the coaching form of natural selection to slowly work it&#8217;s evolutionary magic, the league decided to ban the bump and run technique that had begun to shut down many NFL passing attacks.\u00a0 They knocked over a domino that began a chain reaction of increasingly complicated and situationally specific rule changes designed to increase scoring by hamstringing defenses.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s responsible for the incredibly complicated situation that NFL game officials find themselves in today&#8230; resulting in incredible inconsistency of officiating, missed calls, bad calls, blown calls&#8230; many of which are changing the outcomes of games.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Natural selection works in building coaching philosophies&#8230; there is forever a swinging pendulum of offensive dominance, to defensive dominance, and back again&#8230; the league erred in attempting to disrupt that swinging pendulum&#8230; and made a huge mess of the lot of the NFL Official&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Want to fix it? BACK OFF&#8230; make tactics such as bump and run legal again&#8230; let the brilliant offensive coaching minds figure out how to beat it&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>They figured out how to beat the Tampa 2 without league help&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The NFL needs to simply stop tinkering&#8230; let the game be the game.\u00a0 The product that was on NFL fields in 1970 may not have been of the &#8220;quality&#8221; of the teams taking the fields today&#8230; but the game was a whole lot more pure&#8230; and officials made fewer mistakes&#8230; because their rulebook was simple&#8230;\u00a0 clean&#8230; uncomplicated.<\/p>\n<p>HTTR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is NOT about the Redskins loss to the Detroit Lions&#8230; they did not deserve to win that game&#8230; while there were bad calls that influenced the outcome, a good team does not let the game fall into the hands of the officials to begin with. It&#8217;s probably happened for much of the league&#8217;s history, &#8230; <a title=\"Rule Tinkering&#8230; Bad for Football\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/the-hogs.net\/blogs\/2010\/12\/01\/rule-tinkering-bad-for-football\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Rule Tinkering&#8230; Bad for Football\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1659,822,823],"class_list":["post-3899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-washington-redskins","tag-nfl","tag-officials","tag-rules"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Rule Tinkering... 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