Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert Goodman
I never had that thought. If nobody told me the details but I just saw it in a box score, I'd think they made a scheduling mistake that couldn't be better rectified in time, or they didn't have enough players. If I saw in a box score that they had a forfeit in the middle of the season and games before and after it, that would say something different from either starting or ending the season with a run of forfeits. But I could also imagine they were getting beat up in a game and threw in the towel, as in boxing.
What's odd to me is that I'm learning here that although in boxing, both the referee and the coaches are expected to stop the fight according to their judgment, in football you're looking for some uniform rule to stop the fight (the original poster wanted immediate endings, others wanting timing rule changes) early, and although the teams are allowed to do so, it's considered outre for the captain to forfeit under the same sort of conditions and for the same reasons that you want the rules to cause the game to end. So you want to make them do it, but acknowledge that it's bad for them to decide to do it. And it's under circumstances that would be extremely unlikely to make a difference to gamblers. It just seems like a very odd situation to me.
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If a game ends due to a mercy rule, it ends because of a stipulation that existed before the game started. If a team forfeits, it is declaring the game over despite the wishes of the opposing team. That's a significant difference.
Take soccer for instance. If you pull your team from the field in soccer (the only way to forfeit a match in progress), you force the referee to abandon the game. Whoever forces a soccer match to be abandoned is hit with significant penalties. It's consider very unsporting.