For His Sake, Don’t Replay It Again, Sam

The trouble with football is, it’s not a sport, it’s a debating society.

It’s also like that famous dromedary, which, we are told, is a horse designed by a committee. It’s got so many whereases and rules and injunctions and caveats piled on top of it that it looks in poor light like the hunchback of Notre Dame. It’s a wonder it isn’t paralyzed altogether, that it can navigate at all.

They change the game every half hour. Not so long ago it was illegal to re-substitute a player if he had gone out of the game that half. Later, that was changed so that a player replaced could not go back into the game that quarter. This meant that if you took a player out in the fourth quarter, he was through for the day.

When they changed that, they went whole hog. Today, unlimited substitution is permitted. The football field usually looks like a cattle pen in a thunderstorm.

It used to be that, if you threw two incomplete passes in a row, you got penalized five yards. If you threw an incompletion into the end zone, it was a touchback and the ball went over to the other team on its 20-yard line. You had to be five yards behind the line of scrimmage just to throw the ball at all.

They used to let defensive linemen slap the ears off offensive linemen in the pass rush. They used to forbid offensive linemen from holding their arms out from their body in blocking. Now, they can do everything but pull your nose off.

They used to let everybody run downfield under a punt or a pass. Now, there are myriad illegally-downfield penalties. Hurdling a prostrate player or the line of scrimmage used to be illegal. Now, airborne touchdowns are commonplace.

They tinker with the game endlessly. The penal code governing it is as thick as Napoleon’s.

It used to be a simple game to officiate. You had 11 guys on a side, a coach, a football and a referee. Now, in pro ball at least, they have seven judges on the field and a replay official armed with a replay camera in the press box.

This latter is a particularly revolting development, a further step in dehumanizing the game.

They’re turning it into an arcade game.

You would think seven guys would be enough to monitor the activities of 22. You would think, at worst, that any bad calls would even out, given the seven guys were men of probity and dignity, which they are.

But you see, the Anglo-Saxon mind loves rules and law. You see it in everyday life. The love of the law transcends the love of justice. The Magna Charta was brought into effect not so much to redress wrongs as to give the lords of the realm something to argue about on the long winter nights. I think it was Jefferson who said that he who governs best, governs least. But that’s no fun at all.

The only thing the Anglo-Saxon loves better than his nit-picking law is his machines. Whenever there is an opportunity to bring the two together, he is ecstatic.

Football has now given him, and us, that Nirvana. He gets controversy and electronics in the same package. Rube Goldberg would have loved it. Ball (A) is fumbled by player (B) or not fumbled and recovered by player (C), which triggers official (D) to signal play dead, which triggers crowd (E) into paroxysm of booing and activates screen (F) in press box which is then reviewed by a judge (G).

You saw the ultimate idiocy of this line of officiating Sunday at Washington’s RFK Stadium when it took nearly five minutes to “decide” whether a key fumble had been committed or not.

Actually, it is the notion in this court of law that a fumble occurs on a football field whenever a ballcarrier does not hang onto the ball. Just as I think that in baseball a strike has occurred whenever a batter crosses any part of the plate with a bat on a pitch he is obviously badly fooled on.

But, here again, we have our society’s love of subheading B to section 12 paragraph 20, of the federal code governing the playing of games. It’s not the game that’s important, it’s the legalities. The guy’s knee didn’t touch the ground--or it did touch the ground--or both. Whatever. We need a trial, evidence, expert witnesses, a jury. Everything but a bailiff and Judge Wapner.

What’s next? Appeal? Can the ballcarrier be excused because the tackler or the official didn’t read him his rights?

Can the lawyers be far behind if games are now being decided off the field of play? Will they run on the field, taking photographs of the scene of the accident, subpoenaing witnesses? Will they get injunctive relief forbidding the continuation of the game until they can get a court ruling? Will they handcuff a decision until they can haul the commissioner of football into court on discovery? Will they loudly threaten to “take this to the highest court in the land” on the plaint that their client’s--the fumbler’s--livelihood is being menaced?

In a society in which men strap themselves into a cylinder of valves and circuits and confidently go to the moon, the belief in the efficacy of machines is total. But, the joker is, people still have to interpret those machines. Human error creeps into the equation sooner or later.

If we are going to have games determined by computer, why not do away with the middlemen--the players--altogether? Just feed the machines the pertinent data concerning the Rams and the Redskins and let the transistors fight it out.

If we don’t want to do that, why don’t we just let the guys in the striped shirts call the game? What do we want, a sport or a litigation? Let the machines get their own game. As long as it’s being played by people, let it be run by people.

The machines are making us obsolete fast enough. Let’s keep them out of sport. We can still pile rules on top of rules and argument on top of argument. Who’s going to get in an argument with a tape machine in a bar over the winter? Or, maybe, we’ll build machines for that, too.