Syracuse, N.Y. -- It’s been said that baseball is a game of failure . . . and, as a batter can fall short of his goal 70% of the time and still be considered a star, it absolutely is a game of failure (although if you show me a .300 shooter in the NHL, I’ll show you a three-headed goat in a chorus line).
But football is, among other things, a game of flaws. And not just because those who play it are all but guaranteed, sooner or later, to hear doorbells ringing when nobody is standing on the stoop.
It’s the rules, some of which are harder to explain than Snooki as millionaire. But there are three, specifically, that must . . . Must . . . MUST . . . be changed.
(1) Why this insistence that the ground can’t cause a fumble? It can. It happens all the time. The ground can cause a fumble . . . and it should be allowed to do so. The other night during World Series Game No. 3 down in Texas, San Francisco’s Pat Burrell dove and caught (sort of, kind of) a sinking line drive. But then he landed on the turf and the ball popped out of his glove . . . and the guy who hit it was allowed to stay on first base. Because, altogether now, the ground can cause a fumble! It’s simple, football people. If the guy doesn’t have the ball after hitting the deck, he didn’t really catch it. Why is this concept so difficult to grasp?
(2) Forward progress is backward thinking. We are talking about tackle football, aren’t we? And the idea behind a “tackle” is to put the guy with the ball on the ground, right? So, why are there times when a runner is churning, scrapping, competing to advance the ball -- and all, completely upright -- and arbitrarily told to cease and desist? Hmmmm. The bottom line is that we have something called tackle football that features plays where tackling right there in the middle of the field is disallowed. Strange. Very strange.
(3) The plane of the end zone is the bane of the touchdown. Isn’t the entire idea of the game of football to push the ball into the end zone? To touch the ball down on the scoring side of the goal line? When did physics and geometry come into play? That football analysts seriously discuss whether “the nose of the football broke the plane” is . . . well, it’s seriously embarrassing. Same thing with watching sober-faced officials huddle around a re-play screen to see if someone actually crossed the goal line. How about this for a rule: If you need a camera to determine whether a guy made it into the end zone or not, he didn’t.
Hey, I’m just saying.
(Bud Poliquin’s freshly-written on-line commentaries, his columns and his “To The Point” observations appear virtually every day on syracuse.com. His work can also be regularly found on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. Additionally, he can be heard Mondays through Fridays (10 a.m.-12 noon), on the “Bud & the Manchild” sports-talk radio show on The Score 1260-AM. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org).