Telephones and radios still have dials, and telephones are still dialed. I haven't seen basketball players called "cagers" in a while, though, so maybe that one's finally passe -- and how often was basketball ever played in a cage, anyway? (Or was the basket itself the cage, and they were trying to cage the ball?)

See, you're thinking of only addressing problems. If there were really a problem with football, the solution would be simple: Don't play it.

Football is discretionary, so it's not a matter of remedies, but one of what can be done to make it more attractive. To look closest to the question at hand, when the 2-pt. conversion was introduced, it was not to address a problem. Or to look at other examples from football, when NCAA abolished the free kick from a fair catch, it was not to address a problem, nor was it doing so the year previous to that, when they abolished the fair catch entirely (nor was the CRU when they did similarly). Yes, frequently rule changes are made or considered to address drawbacks in safety or in ease of administration, or to redress a change in balance that was introduced by some other rule change or a change in play techniques. But the rest of the time it's that they think people will like it better a certain way.

I've also pointed out here that often rule changes have been sold on the basis of safety, when in reality safety was at best a secondary motiv'n. If they wanted to they could say abolishing the try improves safety by abolishing that many downs in the game!

If you think that's silly, remember the chief tool the NCAA wielded for making football "safer": shortening the season in length & number of games. At the time the NCAA was organized, there were some in it who hoped to taper off football to at most a single annual ceremonial game per pair of institutions within a few years.

These would be people ignorant of the etymology of the name of their own game.

They probably also don't realize that the English are responsible for the name soccer.

Regarding the elimination of the try, I guess I'm ambivalent. It's far from a foregone conclusion at any level as far as I'm concerned however Aggie has a point I'm. The kicking game's days appear to be numbered with all of the new kicking rules being implemented to make the game safer.

Hey grandson... back in the day they used to have these posts on each end of the field, and if you could kick it between them it was worth 3 points. No, really, I promise. And even more kechny (the slang used in 2035), after a T-Down you only got 6 points and had to kick it through these posts to get the 7th point. No, I'm not filching you - honest truth!

If you can get your head around that, it's even weirder. They used to have people on the field in striped shirts deciding where the play ended and whether someone was cheating or not. And I was one of them.

"So when were you replaced by robots, grandpa?"

Back in about 2020, they began gradually replacing the on-field officials with electronics. Sensors in the ball and gloves and pads and electronics under the field and the many cameras allow us to know precisely where forward progress was stopped on a play or where the ball was when out of bounds was touched, as well as whether a ball was caught near a sideline. That also tells us whether a ball crossed a goal line before their knees were down. Heck, they didn't even used to require gloves - most players played barehanded - and not just the QB like today!

We even used to have guys holding sticks to tell you whether 10 yards was made. They would start each series basically guessing where the series started, yet despite the inaccuracy of the starting point, they would get down on their hands and knees to measure the ending point sometimes.

Crazy stuff, lad.

"Grandpa, tell me 'bout the good old days..." ♪ ♬

"your grandma replaced me with a robot about three years after we were married.

Oh -- you mean in officiating."

I've normally seen "egg-chasers" used to refer to rugby players whose ball is decidedly more egg-shaped than a football.

It's actually a nice scoring mechanism if the minor score is difficult enough and if it is a meaningful amount of the major score. It allows for some variation in strategies to get more points than your opponent. By setting the point values where they are, a touchdown is worth two field goals, BUT it can still be worth more than that, making it the true goal of the game, while making it hard to achieve at lower levels. I

If it's a nice scoring mechanism, why don't we see anything like it in games that aren't on the same model? Rugby doesn't count, same tradition; speedball doesn't count because deliberately modeled on same.

Tenpin bowling? Not really, because the add'l score isn't a minor one, and can actually equal or exceed the original score. Besides, bowling has a good reason for it: Once you knock down many pins with the 1st ball, you have fewer targets left, so the add'l score is to compensate and hence reward success.

It would be very easy to imagine extra point opp'ties arranged in other sports. In soccer, you score a goal, you're awarded a penalty kick worth 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.5 goal, for instance. The fact that we haven't seen such developments says there's something wrong with the concept, and that it is just a legacy where it does exist.

Let the extra point be automatic (7 points) unless the team wants to try for two (8 if it's good, 6 if they miss).

Why stop there? Why not let them try for double or nothing on the whole touchdown? And how about a similar feature for every score in hockey and fencing?