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If you could make one change to improve your favorite sport, what would it be?
Title. Whatever you personally consider a sport is good for this post.
Title. Whatever you personally consider a sport is good for this post.
I would strike down hard on flopping and diving i football. Like unreasonable hard just to eradicate the advantage. And I would like people AND journalists ask questions and show the players the embarrassing moments and make them comment on them. Shame them. Watching this game evolve to what it is today has been a sad journey. I've coached 6-7 year olds who dive because they think that's what you do. It's infuriating.
(honest question) Please clarify which football you're referring to.
It's soccer.
How often have you seen flopping and diving in American football? :P
Don't really watch it, so couldn't say. :) Didn't want to assume...
To this I entertain the idea that we phase-out referees in the field and instead we only use cameras like VAR.
It is understood that the reason that diving exists in football is for the the referee to notice the player and consequentially, a foul. Players often complain that if don't do that, the foul does not exist (at least to the referee).
Instead, if we implemented cameras just like VAR, things will be more fair, though having the decision made outside the field could lead to corruption or a sense of injustice greater than now.
Any sufficiently advanced technology directly opposes the ethos of soccer and will likely never be accepted. There are historical and cultural reasons for that which are hard to pinpoint, but there's one issue I'm able to determine: soccer is the most popular team sport in the world, and it is unified and overseen by a single governing body.
Rules wise, soccer is literally the same in Congo, Argentine, Detroit, and Madrid. The Spanish top league could easily afford and maintain expensive high tech solutions, but the same cannot be said about every single league in every single country. High tech solutions would deeply impact how the game is played, and likely create a division within the sport. No one wants that. Soccer is highly accessible and the same everywhere, that's the beauty of it.
Anyone that sees this comment, that frequents ~sports, and reads my username before reading the comment knows what this is going to be about...
Sumo
If I had the power to change one thing in sumo it wouldn't be the oft-discussed height of the dohyo or transparency of the JSA's decisions/rules clarity (although both of those have their arguments), it would be the complete lack of women in professional sumo. As the dohyo is a holy place, women aren't even allowed to step foot on it, through outdated religious ideas of them being unclean. This recently came to the limelight when a Japanese mayor, giving a speech on the dohyo, suffered a stroke and a woman rushing to deliver first aid was scolded by a 'panicked' referee to get out of the ring. Other attention has been called by the excellent documentary Little Miss Sumo; and while I don't think the JSA will change any time soon (little in Japan does), there is little in sumo I want more than a professional female sumo association.
Edit
an word
Also, if I had a WJSA (Women's Japan Sumo Association) they could have their tournament in the even numbered months (sumo is in odd numbered months at present) and then I'd have sumo every month of the year and I would be so happy.
That's off topic, but I must use this opportunity to pick the brain of Tildes' sumo correspondent.
How healthy are sumo fighters? Do they face the common issues associated with obesity? What about injures? Are injuries common, and how severe they are?
The most common problem among rikishi is premature/abnormal wear on the joints as a result of their weight and constant training regiment. This is pretty typical of any professional sport though, it's wear and tear on the body that largely isn't apparent until after retirement/near the end of the athlete's career. The wear on joints, knees especially, is what ends most rikishi careers. Diabetes isn't common, nor any other weight related illness as their diet is almost exclusively unprocessed foods and they have daily workout regiments that rival any other professional sport.
Injuries are most commonly sprains from falling from/being launched off the dohyo which sits about 2 feet off the ground. They all have pretty solid training on how to take a fall to minimize injuries, but you still can't beat physics. It also doesn't help that the crowd and judges sit ringside with only a small gap between the dohyo and fans, so at the same time these veritable giants in Japan are rocketing out of the arena they are also taking care not to injure anyone else in the process. I've seen a few matches that should not have had any injuries result in sprains from a 300lb ball of muscle try to dodge the 130lb frail elderly man sitting ringside so that he doesn't crush anyone.
There have also been concussions as the inevitable will occur when two men crash into each other head first. Most of the time they go to the side and no collision occurs, but part of sumo is not knowing what your opponent's strategy and if you both go to the same side bonks happen and concussions can occur. Over the last couple of years there have been some pretty serious cases of this happening and the always present issue of trying to keep the traditions moving along without interruption have come under fire. Concussion protocols are thankfully in present and enforced now so that a stunned and stumbling rikishi isn't trying to go through the motions and risk further injury because tradition dictates it.
That seems so interesting. I have to watch this sometime. Thanks.
F1. The current big deal is the new regulations that are supposed to reduce "dirty air", i.e. the wake of the car that is so turbulent the following cars are affected adversely.
I'd really like to see the engineers design cars to a different set of rules. Instead of prescribing exactly where and how aerodynamic devices can be placed (which is what this set of new regulations does), how about we prescribe the properties we actually care about: "A valid car has to limit its aerodynamic effect on a following car. An identical car following behind at a distance of X meters may only have Y% loss in downforce at a speed of Y." Define a bunch of (X,Y,Z) and you force the engineers to either build cars that can handle dirty air or don't produce much of it. Define a maximum length, width and height for the car, as well as the maximum fuel weight for a race, let them go crazy with all the freedom.
I'd love to see what the teams would come up with.
I would make tennis go back to wooden rackets.
Hear me out! Modern rackets are so light and deliver so much power that they've made ball travel way too fast for many formerly viable play styles to keep working. At the highest levels the game is almost entirely dominated by players who hit aggressive power-shots from the baseline. Serve-and-volley players are rare and Michael Chang style guys who used to run the ball down all over the court are basically extinct. (Which is a shame, because Michael Chang was always really fun to watch playing). You still see these styles of play among amateurs and high school level players, but they're simply non-viable at the professional level.
But get us back on wooden rackets (or even the aluminum/graphite alloys common in the 90s) and I think we'd see the game come back to something more strategic that lets a wider variety of play-styles flourish.
This reminds me of what happened to men's volleyball. In the old days there were more sophisticated plays and tactics, nowadays it's all about hitting the ball very hard from start to finish. The ball is now hard to see, and the games are extremely boring. Women's volleyball remain interesting.
Were there changes in the balls or courts or did the skill/fitness levels of the athletes just get too good?
The point system changed in 1998 from 15 to 25 points in a set, eliminating the need for advantage in such a way that any error automatically gives a point. My guess is that it became good strategy to force every service and play in order to induce error in the adversary. There's also less space for creativity since every play can result in a point against you. Yeah, the players are generally more muscular, but I think that's a consequence of the rule change.
I haven't followed the sport closely for more than a decade, so that's just my guess.
This touches on @elcuello's complaint about association football (soccer).
Right now, an official soccer match has one mobile referee and two fixed assistants (off-side referees). A soccer field can have an area of up to 90m by 120m, and a referee runs up to 12km (about 8 miles) on a single match. One of the reasons why players exaggerate fouls is that, if they don't do that, there's a great chance that the referee won't see it. It's fairly easy to get away with a foul in soccer. That is different from faking a foul altogether, I'm not defending that. But there's a certain amount of "legitimate" exaggeration which unfamiliar audiences fail to understand.
Referees are, in general, older and less fit than players. And, unlike players, they must be present and alert in every play. It's virtually impossible to be an effective referee in soccer. Depending on the league, there are also constant doubts and accusations of corruption.
My solution to all of the above is to simply add another referee. Each referee would be responsible for half the field (which is already neatly divided in two). By having two referees, you reduce the odds and influence of corruption, since you'd have to corrupt two referees instead of one. The respective side of each referee would be defined by a coin toss in front of both teams. Since teams alternate sides after half-time, each referee would be alternatively responsible for both teams. With less area to cover, the referees would be well-rested, alert, and therefore more able to get a closer look at every play. That way, more legitimate fouls would be caught, removing the need for exaggerating injuries. It would also be easier for the referee to know when someone is faking, so they can apply the appropriate yellow card.
While I understand your logic and I'm sure it would help I don't particular agree with that approach. For me that's the American way of looking at things. More rules and more referees and more TV surveillance will fix everything. We already have VAR and I fucking hate it and how it has broken the game into uncertainties and excruciating unnecessary breaks in the game. I'm talking about changing the core of football and the ethics. We need to learn kids from early on that this behavior simply isn't acceptable and makes the game worse. Not because it's a rule but because that's not football. It needs to come from the inside and stem from respect for the opponents, the referee and the game itself. That's why we need to strike down hard on the professional players now so kids looking up to them see that's not the way. The real work is in the kids and young players.
I find it hard to change a sport when there's so much incentive for undesirable behavior. Incidentally, I'm not American, and I'm not in America ;)
I never assumed you were but the idea of "policing" more whether it's with technology or more refereeing is just a very American way of looking for answers in my world. That's why we need to remove the incentive.
I understand. But we're talking about a sport, and rules are at the core of every sport. Everywhere, they're object of incessant debates and occasional adjustments. This is not exclusive to the United States.
While laudable, it is unlikely that a purely educational effort would be able to overcome the very fact that some undesirable behaviors are made advantageous by the rules of the sport.
You might see some change in amateur/lower leagues where the stakes are low, but when the prize is high enough players default to whatever behavior secures an advantage. And once a behavior is accepted in major leagues, new players will likely reproduce it.
Another avenue this could be improved, at least where the budget is there, is to use recordings to replay a situation after the fact. Basically, if a foul was alleged, look at the tape real quick and make a decision. My understanding (though I haven't actively watched football since forever) is that most misjudgements could be handled that way, and the incentive to over-exaggerate fouls or fake them goes away, leading to cleaner play overall. Of course, the integration of the recordings would have to be prompt to not interrupt the game too much.
An avenue to make this work smoothly would be to implement a mechanism for after-the-fact asynchronous penalties. Those come with some uncertainties, but e.g. Formula 1 manages to penalize track limit violations quickly enough that it doesn't matter. Those penalties are extremely consistent (let's not talk about the actual track limits) and they happen relatively quickly. I think it should be entirely possible for an off-court (team of) referees to make a decision on the vast majority of situations while the ball is still in play.
After hearing and reading arguments on the topic, I'm convinced:
In any sport, I don't think regular season games should be allowed to continue indefinitely. Ties should be a legitimate outcome, and the scoring in the standings should accommodate this outcome. The common suggested system is simply: 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, 0 points for a loss.
Take baseball and basketball as examples. If a baseball game is tied after 9 innings, the game continues with more innings until the tie is broken at the end of an inning. In basketball, if a game is tied after game time expires, then a 5 minute overtime period is played. (If it's still tied after that, continue playing 5 minute overtime periods until the score is untied at the end of the period.)
The major problem with allowing infinite game time is that it exhausts both teams, and then those teams' opponents in the next game are provided an advantage (playing a tired team) without them doing anything to merit it. This seems unfair to me, when the solution of allowing tie games would remove this obvious imbalance. The issue is particularly impactful in baseball, because pitchers are limited in how much (how many pitches) they should throw in any given time span, to prevent injury. e.g. a relief pitcher should be capped at around 30 pitches per 2 or 3 days. So, if a pitching staff is "used up" and depleted, the team faces its next opponent shorthanded.
Furthermore, preventing games from running long will help the broadcasting companies, because they will be able to schedule their programming better, and programming that follows sporting events won't get pre-empted.
Allow ties. It only makes sense.
This issue highlights one of the major problems I have with baseball, and to an extent basketball and hockey.
There are too many games.
The regular baseball season is 6 months long (26½ weeks), 186 days, during which each MLB team will play 162 games. Each individual game, when taken into context of the entire season, simply does not matter. By the trade deadline you already know which teams are done for, by Labor Day the offseason is practically determined, yet there a dozens of games that still have to be played after those points with non-contenders that do little more than cause wear and tear on players.
Hockey and basketball are incredibly physical games that definitely have too many games, and even more so when you consider that the current 82 game seasons are limited to that because it's pretty much how often the players can physically perform in span of a season.
In my opinion, the number of games can be linked to the declining viewership of baseball (and hockey and basketball) and resulting in the trend of smaller/lower capacity stadiums being built under the guise of creating a "better experience." A lot of the viewership decline is blamed "fragmentation of the media industry" (because there are more places for people to point their eyeballs these days), but there's only one sport that hasn't had that problem and it's the one with the shortest season and where every game matters: football
Part of it is probably "business". More games means more advertising opportunities. I sometimes muse: Baseball must've been invented by someone in marketing. 9 innings, 18 half innings, with an opportunity to spam people in between each. Times 162 games.
Oh yeah, absolutely no way any of the teams/owners/powers that be would let it reduce by any significant number and the advertising dollars is exactly why the NFL has just expanded the regular season to 17 games and will undoubtedly push to make it 18 games.
Not this season!
I agree though. Each year I tune in for the first few games of the season, I'll keep an eye on scores throughout the summer and occasionally toss a game on for a bit if I'm bored, but then don't really start paying attention again until postseason arrives assuming my team is in.
I don't know anything about baseball but that makes sense. Are ties common enough in basketball for that to be an issue, though?
One negative is that audiences generally dislike ties.
It's true, NBA games are usually resolved within 1 or 2 overtimes, but it's not unheard of to go to triple overtime.
For hockey...
Going to a shootout after a scoreless overtime in the regular season feels so gimmicky to me, so here's an equally gimmicky idea for how to end OT quickly: cut the number of players on the ice down by 1 every five minutes until it's just 1v1 (plus two goalies). If no one scores at that point then maybe even pull the goalies and just have 1v1 with two empty nets (lol).
Regular season OT is already played 3v3 instead of 5v5; why not just keep going? Executing a safe line change would probably be a challenge at 1v1, but I still think it would be more enjoyable to watch than the criminally slow-paced shootout.
This suggestion is not-so-serious but I would love to see it, even if only for one season.
I love this. It would be way less frustrating than losing on a shootout.
I'm a big fan of American football. I know it sounds silly, but I'd remove all pads and helmets from the game.
Hello A7FL!
I would still like to keep the OL and DL intact. I think the games that occur on the line of scrimmage are extremely interesting. Not having pads would probably benefit the defense though, as (unpenalized) holding would be slightly harder.
I don't know any other team sport in which the players look like they're going to war against the robots in 2099.
Jokes aside, I understand that the armor makes players more likely to apply and receive impact, which leads to dangerous issues like brain damage. Rugby and similar no armor sports doesn't seem to suffer as much from that.
I've always heard that head injuries are less common in non-armored sports, but I've never dug deep into any studies on it. Just having played football I know that I was way more likely to use my body as a weapon with pads and a helmet on.
Would that kinda resemble rugby?
Yeah in a sense. Rugby players are way tougher though.
I'm gonna count Battlebots and Combat Robotics overall as sports because if F1 counts so does Battlebots.
In short: Remove the limiters.
Long version: Battlebots has become an extremely dangerous event over the years. Way back when combat robotics was early on, Blendo (Jamie Hyneman's crown jewel) was granted co-winner status on more than one occasion because his design was causing too much damage to... Well, everything. But things have advanced significantly since then. These days, combat robotics takes place in a huge, contained box, made of extremely thick bullet-resistant glass, with AR500 steel plate making the bulk of the box itself. This makes it pretty safe, honestly. Bots explode, chunks get launched at hundreds of miles per hour across the box, shit goes completely haywire, and... Everyone outside is, at worst, scared. Over the last few years, though, they've made some changes which are very noteworthy, and I think are driven by financial concerns. Weapon weight on spinners, for example, has been capped at 80 lbs (the main show is Heavyweight robotics, which uses up to 250 lbs total. Weapons used to exceed 100 lbs). Weapon speed on spinners has been capped at 250 mph (rather legendarily, Tombstone's weaponry used to exceed 400 mph at max spin and had to be seriously nerfed to be allowed to compete after the rule change). There's caps on flamethrower size. There's caps on this and that, there's caps on EVERYTHING. If I had to guess, it's because they don't want to have to spend as much replacing floor tiles, glass panels, etc. and upgrading the box to handle the potential damages.
I want those caps to piss right off. Screw all that nonsense, if you can spin up a spinner to 500 mph at 120 lbs while still keeping mobile and controllable, you fucking DO IT. If you want flamethrowers that can genuinely put the fear of god in your enemy, GO FOR IT!
Is this going to turn the meta into literally nothing but the biggest, baddest, most horrifying spinners being on top?
Actually, no! Turns out that agility and control are a HUGE part of the sport at the top level and have been for ages (In fact, some of the top bots from before the limitations were added were lifters, flippers, and bots with considerably smaller weapons which were used in precise ways rather than blunt force attacks)! One of the biggest vertical spinners currently can barely function in a fight because the gyroscopic forces of their vertical spinner are so massive they can barely move without exploding (Deep Six- back in season 4, it literally killed itself in a test spin-up by trying to move, though recent restrictions have lessened its power... But it still has significant issues moving and struggles against more agile opponents). But if someone manages to wrangle it into function (Lookin' at you, Ray), let 'em have it! Maybe have a rule where you gotta give 'em a season's warning if your new weaponry exceeds the most powerful weapons to enter the box before that point so they can upgrade it appropriately.
Also the meta is currently "literally just be Bite Force" anyway so it's not like a screwed meta can get that much more screwed.
There's only three real issues that I see arising from that. One, it's less accessible to newbies, as getting up to par with the higher bar is gonna be more difficult. This isn't really that much of a problem, if I'm being brutally honest. Battlebots isn't exactly for newbies. It's one of the top combat robotics competitions, and maybe newbies should start at lower level competitions and with smaller scale robots if they want to get into the sport. Two, the competitors would likely take considerably more damage in the fights with bigger opponents, so additional time and resources may be needed behind the scenes to support the teams mid-season and prevent early dropouts, as well as additional rewards for participation to encourage joining in. Three, there would be additional expense in upgrading the safety measures, the durability of the battlebox, etc., and in replacement parts, which would likely add up after a while... Though I suspect it could still be profitable regardless.
College football: Adopt timing rules similar to rugby (where the clock basically only stops when the ball is out of bounds or a player is injured). Games are far too long, sometimes (mainly postseason) over four hours. Oh, also Canadian football's kicking rules.
Baseball: A short, and strictly enforced, pitch clock.
Basketball/hockey: Much smaller playoffs.
NASCAR: Abolish stage racing and the Chase/Playoffs.
F1: Ovals. Also more races in general.
IRL: Dust off any of the CART formulæ from 1990 to 2008 (preferably earlier). Also more races.
Sumō: A shorter dōhyō.
Pro wrestling: An even more sports-based product. Like boxing with a storyline. Also strict forbiddance of outside interference, punished by large fines and lengthy suspensions as the (kayfabe) state athletic commission dictates.
I remember Joe Rogan had an idea for a modified MMA ruleset where the fight would occur in an extremely large arena, not a small cage, and there would be no rounds. I'm not sure how well that would actually work given fighters could use the space to stall the fight, but it did sound intriguing.
You might see a lot more fights like this one from the early days of UFC
I think we'd see a lot of running.
I agree, but it would introduce all sorts of new wrinkles. Like, for instance, what if the "chaser" isn't as strong with their cardio as the "chasee"? The "chaser" would wear themselves out and give an advantage to the "chasee".
Yeah. That doesn't sound very entertaining. You'd have a lot of marathon runners running non-stop around the ring and finishing the opponent with a single punch lol.
In practice, there should be limits imposed to running, otherwise the fighting aspect would soon disappear.
Now I want to see marathon runners fighting each other!
"play off hockey", it's bullshit that the rules are conveniently ignored because the game is 'important.' I would kill that instantly.
Would you mind explaining what you're talking about for those who, like me, know nothing about hockey?
It's the same thing that the NBA does. Where obvious penalties aren't called by the officials because it's the playoffs. It usually benefits the bigger market teams or at least the more physical ones. It's why there are so many injuries in the playoffs. If it's a penalty in the regular season than it should be in the playoffs too. I find it frustrating.