We want more officials so that the game is covered better. I work 3 sports, including football and basketball and the last thing I want is to interrupt the game unnecessarily. Still 7 officials can cover a field better than 4 and that increases the likelihood we will make the necessary calls correctly so the players can really be responsible for the outcome of the game.

That's not a recent rule change. The kicking team has never been allowed to advance a kick that wasn't possessed and then fumbled by the receivers.

Quote: That's not a recent rule change. The kicking team has never been allowed to advance a kick that wasn't possessed and then fumbled by the receivers.

What if the ball is never touched by the recievers?

See now you have me doing it, what if the ball comes in contact with a blade of grass, should it be time for you to blow the whistle or call a penalty, throw a flag; maybe illegal use of the brain or hands or feet or fingers or toes...maybe illegal touching of the ball during the game penalty...?

ridiculous....!

Quote:We want more officials so that the game is covered better. I work 3 sports, including football and basketball and the last thing I want is to interrupt the game unnecessarily. Still 7 officials can cover a field better than 4 and that increases the likelihood we will make the necessary calls correctly so the players can really be responsible for the outcome of the game.

You should only try and officiate one sport at a time, you authority maniac...

How many refs do you suppose is enough? One per player, so that they players can decide the outcome of the game?...you are so full of bull carp...!

Do you really believe that the refs are there to make the game more enjoyable. If there weren't so many ridiculous rules, you wouldn't need a of team of refs to enforce them...think about it....offense vs defense vs refs?!?!

Spoken like a true ref...

Jimmy

It's not a rule change. You're wrong.

Your post was illegal use of the brain! :D

Ha ha...


The refs ruin the sport, counter that argument...!

You can not deny that the more rules there are to enforce, that justify more refs needed to enforce them, the more likelyhood that the game will be interupted to enforce the multitude of rules...

Which takes this BS full circle back to the point of who it is that decides what and how many rules there will be, the coaches. You will not care to hear this but the NCAA rules committee (all coaches and AD's) are pressured by many groups, i.e. the trainer's organization, TV networks, AFCA, etc but the only influence the refs have is that once the committee decides they want a rule, the rules editor, a ref supervisor, helps them write it in a way it can be officiated.

No, I'm referring to their own brand of justice applied on the pitch by two teammates against an opponent because you never saw the original infraction. You're not Santa Claus. Players know you can't see everything.

Without officials it would be a sandlot game.

Please find a fan forum to troll.

In Canada, we still allow the kicking team to advance the ball that they recover. It seems kind of strange that in the U.S. this is not allowed. I think the kicking team running downfield is exciting.

Wonder why they changed it (back in the early dawn when football separated from Rugby). Did the U.S. rulemakers feel there would be too much excitement on recovered onside kicks?

Yeah, and each rule broken into sections, paragraphs, etc., whoopee. Until a few years ago it was a lot more rules than that, they just reorganized them. Rugby's been thru that before, BTW, and so have American & Canadian football. They get up to 40-some rules and then they decide to re-edit them into 10 or 13, so what? The book's just as long once they interpolate all the rulings.

There are ways of doing this semi-automatically. You use a compression algorithm to search for repeated strings, and then instead of computer code to represent them, you use judgement to decide whether it's reasonable to define a term that will work for all of those occurrences.

Robert

"Recent"? Unless you're talking Canadian, that value of "recent" makes for the really looooong view of American football! In another thread I'm criticizing Mr. Redding for a quote that essentially equates his lifetime (or less) with the entire history of football, but looks like the opposite problem here. (Please don't tell me they made that change recently in Football Canada or CFL.)

Seriously, the only codes I know of in 11-a-side that allow team K to advance their free kick are possibly the IWFL and possibly Big Apple Youth Football, and I suspect an editing error in the case of the IWFL and officials' errors in BAYF. Arena Football allows it. 11s banned it faaaar back in the 20th C, maybe even before NFL & Fed rules diverged from NCAA.

Sorry, Rich, your "never" betrays the opposite problem from JPC75's use of "recent". The rule's old, but not original equipment.

Combination of 2 factors:

1. safety
2. desire to separate attacking from defending functions

Factor #1 says the safest ball is a dead ball. Fed went the farthest in this regard, killing the ball for more reasons than any other code. However, I see that Fed has reversed that tendency somewhat in the last decade or two.

Factor #2 is purely a matter of taste. Going back to 1880 there's been a desire in American football to make the offense beat a prepared defense, rather than allowing unexpected possession to provide spontaneous play. (Even Canadian football hasn't been devoid of that sentiment, as shown during a brief period when fewer points were awarded for an "unearned" try -- pouncing on a ball left by opponents behind their goal line -- than for an "earned" one -- advanced by the attacking team.) That operated in allowing team A an uncontested scrimmage to begin with, and was also a factor in the NCAA's keeping for so long their rule forbidding advance of an opponent's grounded fumble or muff (which, however, was originally adopted to encourage risky lateral passes).

Robert

First of all, most officials call what's there. They don't seek more control or want more penalties. Most of them, in fact, want fewer. The game gets over faster. Plus, the crews that get the best schedules around here are the ones that have the fewest penalties (and they all know that). So you couldn't be more wrong on this point.

Second, we don't want any more officials out on the field or court than is necessary to do our job. I don't want more than 3 officials in basketball nor more than 7 in football (5 in subvarsity). So, you're wrong here as well.

I love it when people that know nothing about officiating start talking about what officials want.

and you have the audacity to say football officials are on a power trip....wow....