Does this site ever discuss football?

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by scrounge

I don't think it's a great analogy to say that many youth baseball leagues use OBR so why not use NCAA for sub-college HS. In my opinion, there is far more commonality in the main playing rules from OBR to FED in baseball than NCAA to FED in football.

Partly that's for historic reasons. The pros invented baseball as we know it, so all the codes are derived from OBR. Football as we know it was invented by the colleges -- students & alumni. Basketball was invented by the YMCA. Soccer was imported intact.

Of those, football's rules have always been the most contentious & turbulent, so you'd expect a lot of diversity. The pros honed baseball's rules and developed such a following that theirs became everybody's model. Basketball was almost proprietary in its early development, so they too got out most of the kinks. Soccer is played internationally, so it's going to conform pretty closely, plus it's simple enough that there's not much that would reasonably vary.

Softball has so much rules variation, even though it's on a baseball model, because it has such wide particip'n by people who are into it to varying degrees. That's how it's developed specialties like 16".