It’s a Grand Old Game, if Only . . .

Now that the pro football playoffs are upon us, the ribbon clerks run out of the game, the stakes are highest and history is on the line, there are a few changes I would like to make--or see made.

First of all, I would abolish the field goal in sudden-death overtime. You might as well decide it by the coin flip. Giving the ball to Joe Montana and telling him all he has to do is get the team in field goal range is like giving a shark the first bite. Fifty-yard field goals are getting commonplace, not to say boring. It makes for too inconclusive an outcome.

In fact, you wonder about the conclusiveness of the sudden-death format generally. In no other sport does overtime conclude when only one of the contestants has had the ball. Think about it.

In baseball, if the visiting team scores in the top of the 10th inning, the game isn’t over. The other team gets three outs.

In tennis, the tiebreaker calls for both players to get to serve.

In basketball, overtime isn’t over with the first basket or foul shot.

In golf, both players get to shoot.

Only in football can a team get to a Super Bowl through a process in which the other team never, so to speak, gets up to the plate in extra innings.

Left to me, I would provide for tie games during the regular season and devise a sudden-death format for the playoffs in which each team would get at least one whack at the ball.

You understand I am serving without fee here. I offer these modifications out of the goodness of my heart. I have only the best interests of America’s teams at heart, and seek no copyright. They are my contribution to the public weal.

And, while I am in this public-spirited mood, I would like also to recommend to the football conferences that they take the electronic instant replay review and drop it into the Housatonic River.

I am fed up to here with the Anglo-Saxon predilection for gadgetry, to say nothing of legal nit-picking. I get almost apoplectic when I hear one of those eminent scholars of the game in the TV booth say, “Oho! He had one corner of his big toe in bounds when he caught that pass--it’s a legal catch!”

Bah! If it takes a sophisticated instrument about on a par with one of those telescopes that can find a dust particle four galaxies away to determine that a guy had a toenail in bounds, I say why not scrap the human element altogether and play the game with electronic robots.

Look, if a guy has too little of himself in bounds to be detected by the naked eye, he’s out of bounds--period. Line up and play ball. Next, we’ll have to be delaying the game while we wait for one of those spy satellites to overfly the field from its orbital path around the earth. We’ll review the electronic review. Instead of guys in the press box, we’ll have guys in spaceships monitoring the monitors.

I get even more annoyed at the self-appointed zebras in the broadcast booths. They increasingly spend their time poring over replays and venting their opinions as to the correctness or lack thereof of calls on the field.

Who asked them? Take last Saturday. It was one of the most important calls of the season. The Washington Redskins had the ball and the lead, 7-6, and were driving to the Philadelphia Eagles’ goal line when their halfback, Ernest Byner, caught a pass on the 17-yard-line. He was tackled and fumbled the ball. An Eagle cornerback scooped it up and ran for a touchdown, giving the Eagles a 13-7 lead and changing the game for Washington, maybe terminally.

The officials on the field ruled it a fumble and a touchdown. But up in the broadcast booth, the ex-Redskin quarterback, Joe Theismann, was beside himself.

“That’s not a fumble! That’s not a fumble!” he kept exclaiming excitedly as they screened the replay. “That’s got to come back!”

Well, the league officials in the replay booth will tell you they pay no attention to the commercial telecast. You can believe that if you want. I’m a more cynical sort. I do not believe an organization as public-relations conscious as the NFL could ignore a message going out to 25 million homes. Let me put it this way: I have never heard Dan Dierdorf, another unappointed replay expert, overruled.

In the Philadelphia game Saturday, I heard a referee say something I never heard before. He carefully announced to the crowd that the officials on the field voted a fumble, a recovery and a touchdown but were countermanded by those electronic scanners on high. Presumably none of them wanted to find a horse in his bed the next morning. Philly plays rough.

My views on the ground causing the fumble are too well known to reprise here. Suffice it to say that, in the old neighborhood, if you didn’t have the ball in the bottom of the pileup it didn’t matter if the fumble was caused by a biting dog. You either had the ball or you didn’t. Besides, the ground was supposed to cause the fumble. That’s why they threw you down on it so hard.

If that wasn’t a fumble Saturday, what was Ben Smith doing with the football?

The game is football, not Nintendo. If we want video games, we’ll go to an arcade. Let’s have one sector of our world that isn’t run by computer.