The Snake Oil Salesman Is At It Again

[Robert Goodman]

Originally Posted by TXMike

At the most basic level, our purpose and charge is to prevent 1 team from cheating against another. When one of those teams unabashedly and deliberately cheats, it is going against our basic purpose, especially since there is little we can do to stop it. Folks can try to parse this and call it a "loophole" or call it "innovation" but an ethical coach would not deliberately cheat in this manner. It all comes down to what is the intent of the rule, and not even KB will argue that what he is doing is in accordnace with the intent.

I wouldn't call it cheating, just that people disagree over whether using this loophole is fair. We can compare this to the situation in NCAA I don't remember how long ago, maybe 15-20 years, when somebody discovered another football loophole. In making a change some time in the late 1960s or 1970s, NCAA had missed a conforming change they should've made at the same time, and this loophole lurked unexploited for years. There was no rule against batting either team's backward pass in any direction as long as it didn't go out of bounds. So one coach had the ostensible holder for a place kick arise slightly and then toss the ball up for the ostensible kicker to volleyball serve forward, then his team scrambled for the ball and recovered it for a touchdown.

The loophole and the play exploiting it was widely publicized and remained for the rest of the season, but it was not widely exploited as some thought. Basically everyone decided that it would be unfair to play the game that way, so they didn't.

However, that doesn't seem to be the case with A-11. There's no consensus that it's an unfair way to play.

Robert