Soccer fans: our refs are the absolute worst. They get everything wrong, they are biased, they are incompetent as individuals and as a whole and they are ruining the game

Also soccer fans: we need to give the refs ultimate power and discretion without accountability as to determine when the game ends because it's part of the charm of the game

We just don't like commercial breaks

Uncouth Canucks not appreciating USA#1's greatest export.

I'd rather go the other way. As in let there be 2 or 3 of them.

Who the **** in their right mind wants to watch pitchers and other terrible hitters come to bat? Do we make field goal kickers play quarterback? Do we make Sydney Crosby play goalie? Pitchers batting is as dumb as those things. If he can hit well enough that you actually want him batting (Ohtani) then it's great. But don't make us watch guys whose batting skills are way below pro level come to bat.

A real improvement to baseball would be to just make the batting order 7 men, and.not 9. You can have 3 players who don't bat, and have one DH.

Football has a right idea. A defensive team and an offensive team. There's no reason baseball teams couldn't benefit from having some players only play defense, and some only hit. There's no reason as fans that we should watch players do stuff that they aren't good at.

You can watch the WNBA.

After an out-of-bounds in the NBA, if any player points in their direction which goes against the call on the floor, it constitutes an official challenge of the call

Would support the same for NFL and fumbles

I would also support this for throw ins in football if we ever adopted any sort of coaches challenge rule

soccer


obvious one everyone should agree with

offsides - change it to being within an arm's length or some other arbitrary measure that we can nitpick and argue over - the spirit of the offsides is in preventing attackers from just camping the net, this adjustment still accomplishes that and allows for attackers to take more freedoms and not be worried if their nose is 2 cm further than the back heel of the defender etc etc


two terrible ones that could destroy the game as we know it

powerplays - most of the time a free kick is pretty meaningless, we should include a timeout period for the offender where the other team gets to play 11 on 10 for a brief period of time

wall near the goal - the purpose of this wall will be to turn near misses into rebounds - which will both assuredly increase scoring but also encourage more players to take big shots from distance rather than just pass it back and forth repeatedly outside the box - could also serve as cool device for creative players to bounce the ball off the wall as a pass or self pass to get around the defender - the wall will only go a couple feet outside the goal so it will only come into play on near misses - we can consider lowering the walls in the event of penalty kicks

Why is offside necessary in hockey and soccer but not in basketball?

I just played both sports recreationally on the playground a lot growing up. Off sides was never an enforced rule. It didn't seem to ruin the games at all to not have it.

Also an idea. Baseball games are really slow (and I say this as a baseball fan who appreciates the slowness but hears over and over again the complaints from non fans that baseball is too slow). Would the game benefit from less of both balls and strikes? What if instead of 4 balls for a walk and 3 strikes for a strikeout it was instead 2 balls for a walk and 2 strikes for a strikeout? Seems like maybe a faster paced game with lower pitch counts.

I've said for a while they should get rid of it in hockey. If anything have a 3 line pass rule. Can't pass from behind your blue to over the other blue line. But would be curious to see how it played out.

And of course soccer should have no offside. Stupid rule for a low scoring sport.

changing the precise point at which someone is onside as opposed to offside does not change the problem people have with the rule, which is taking time to work out if someone is "just" offside, you will always have a point where it switches from one to the other

you're probably right that offense will just start taking more risks and we'll have the same frequency of offsides

it's more about someone makes a great run and doesn't need to worry about whether they are half a millimeter offsides

like this should never be offsides, killing goal because the run started like this is not within the spirit of the rule

the point has flown over your head. you will always need to worry about that.

no i got your point and agree, but i'd rather if the mystery line that caused so much strife and controversy was a few feet beyond the defender rather than anything

Why? You still have the exact same issue and you're taking away EVEN MORE clarity.

When a checker piece becomes a king, it can move like a chess knight.



Could call the new variant: Chessers.

Basketball: No timeouts in the final two minutes of the 4th Q/overtime

You'll still have like a dozen free throws taken in close games which is almost as bad, tho.

I think the only real solution to painful ends of NBA games is to play to a set score instead of a timed 4th quarter (like have the refs set the winning score based on the average of the first 3Q or something like that). You'll have some snoozers that way (not that you don't anyway under current rules), but you'll also have some edge of your seat finishes where the winning score is, say, 95, and both teams are stuck at like 94-93 for three minutes with everyone going all out on defense, or like one team finishes on a 12-0 run to win 95-94, etc.

At least Silver is talking about changing to 40 minute games. Basically the ROW is at 40 minutes, and the pros far outweigh the cons.

If he would move FTs to end of qtr during commercial break then 10 minute qtrs would be even better.

The WNBA has it right. You can use the timeout to advance the ball but you don’t huddle

I think overtime is a slog and should be abolished. Five extra minutes is insane. It’s the perfect use case for Elam ending.

Also Elam should have callled it the Kobe Ending. It would have caught on

What they call it would have made zero difference.

In 2007?

From the Wall Street Journal, baseball:

"Once a game, a manager would have the option to pause the batting order and send any hitter to the plate. Not simply a pinch hitter—any hitter."