Quote:
Originally Posted by BoomerSooner
I'm making my argument in a very legalistic, logical and theoretical manner in order to point out what, in my opinion, is a flaw in rules and case books.
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You are trying to apply overly cramped legalisitc reasoning to a document that isn't written to be analyzed that way. It is not written by lawyers or legislators (who do a good job of botching things even with ostensible expertise), but by coaches. Coming up with bizarre and unlikely hypotheticals doesnt support your decision to not issue a T that is clearly intended by the ruleset. Go ahead and make that decision, but it just isn't supported . . . and throwing in a hypothetical scenario about alien abduction or the gym burning down doesn't change anything.
Do you really think that it is news that the rule book is poorly written in many places (not to mention an organizational disaster)? -- it is a document not merely written by committee, but by committees over time. Overly legalistic parsing of language rarely makes such a document intelligible; reading the rules in concert with the official case plays does. And the official case plays make abunduntly clear that the expected consequence of changing a shirt at the bench is a T. Do I think it is a stupid rule? Yes. (I wonder if it arose from an incident in a girl's game or games, and they needed a uni-sex rule, but I digress.) We can construct extreme examples of scenarios in which, as referees, we might choose not to see something . . . but the plain vanilla scenario is a very, very simple call.
Over and out.