As someone who is forced to watch baseball by their fanatical wife: the MLB should adopt most of the rules that the Savannah Bananas use, including a fan catching a foul ball counts as an out, trick plays, inning timer, etc.
For any pro sport known for rowdy, destructive fans - the clubs get to pay for the police and insurance expenses.
Oh, this would bankrupt the clubs, I hear you say? Oh no. Anyway…!
American Football: no time outs.
Play it just like soccer. Ref’s calls are final, and the clock doesn’t stop unless their is an injury.
It would make the game much more fun to watch, cut the runtime by two thirds, and force teams to hire athletes who can maintain vigorous activity for half an hour without dying.
But when could they run the commercials?
Think about cricket fans 😭😭. We’re dying here
Baseball. No sponsorships on uniforms.
I guess we could extend that to most sports. I know soccer is much more lax in that regard.
All professional teams that are televised must be broadcast free of charge to their local area. No local blackout restrictions. (Fuck you, Marquee Sports. Put the Cubs back on WGN.)
Beer must be under $10, in stadiums. It’s $16 for even shitty domestic beer at Wrigley. It’s damn robbery.
The social contract with soccer has always been that in exchange for shirt sponsors, you get zero commercial breaks except halftime. While American football gets a bad rap for its native flow (which is indeed quite slow and staccato, admittedly), the fact that they literally have “TV timeouts” is what’s most egregious.
And I say that as an American who, while also a soccer fan, just can’t quit gridiron.
College football: when you win the coin toss, you have 2 choices: kick or receive. No more deferrals.
Football
All the players are blindfolded
(I don’t enjoy football, but I’d certainly watch it if it involved people running at each other full speed blindfolded)
Edit: American Football, but I’m honestly open to testing this on other sports too
I would add that at any given time during a football game a fan can throw a new football on the field and two balls may be in-play at that time.
why?
Cricket:
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Remove the backfoot no ball. It does not benefit the sport but puts a lot of stress on bowlers bodies, knees in particular. The most commonly injured body part for bowlers. They land with 6x the impact of their bodyweight on one knee 6 times an over, like 20 overs a day. No good.
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So much I would change in Odis that i dont even have the energy to wrote it all.
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A shit ton of administrative changes.
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Mankads to no longer be stigmatised (they are legal already)
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Allow some level of ball tampering, by which I mean not using anything but allowing some controlled substances.
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Add substitutions
- Remove the backdoor no ball. It does not benefit the sport but puts a lot of stress on bowlers bodies, knees in particular. The most commonly injured body part for bowlers. They land with 6x the impact of their bodyweight on one knee 6 times an over, like 20 overs a day. No good.
I can get behind any rule that exists to protect the players. Sports are inherently physical but they shouldn’t endanger the athletes.
One of the reasons why I have a hard time getting behind boxing/certain martial arts as sports, it just feels like slightly more sanitized gladiatorial combat.
I think fighting sports have their place in society. We’ve had them forever across so many cultures that i can’t really dislike em.
We just enjoy violence I guess. Better it be controlled than not.
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Badminton:
- screaming and shouting and other obviously bad manners meant to psychologically disturb the opponent. Looking at you, Carolina Marín. God I hate her.
- Taking unnecessarily long to serve the shuttle, swaying left and right for a long time before serving. Looking at you, Viktor Axelsen! For shame! 🫵
Something I’d like to see on every hard cap league is a cap relief calculation for team drafted players, going up the later that player was drafted. Maybe 5% per found, maybe 7.5%?
So many times teams are basically forced to move on from role players that are fan favorites because it’s literally impossible to pay a team of veterans under the cap unless you have no star players and I think it would be genuinely interesting to provide a benefit on the cap side to keeping drafted players in house past their first or second deals. Part of why it’s so hard to be a fan is knowing that anyone but the absolute TOP stars are just consistently going to be moving on in a few seasons.
At the same time that would just make luck the deciding factor. Noone knows if a draftee will be good. So whoever gets lucky and drafts that good player or two gets to ride that wave as long as they can play.
Football:
- A lot of financial and psr rules.
- Add rolling subs like basketball.
- Wenger style offside rule. If any part of the attacking players body is behind the last defender, its onside.
- Be stricter against defensive players brutally slashing wingers.
- Stop pthe stupid carding over showboating.
On point 3, that doesn’t solve the issue, it just moves it a yard or so back. The linesmen and women will still have to make the exact same judgement about what was in line with what.
The purpose is not to make the call easier, although by research from the Chinese second division it does (I’m not sure if om correct here, this is by memory)
The actual purpose is to increase goals per match. Sitting deep would become less practical for getafe like teams.
Oh, I see what you mean - sorry, misunderstood which issue was being solved!
I’m still not sure about such a change, but fair enough, my argument wasn’t really pertinent.
Baseball: There is now a gun under second base.
playoff hockey: have referees on the ice that call penalties for rule infractions. playoffs are violent garbage.
Thunderdome rules for MMA. Keep going until there is a sub or knock out. No rounds and no time limit.
Fencing: Allow shields.
HEMA: I’m right here!