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Time-in

- August 20, 2009

huddle.jpg

Baseball is a great game. Yes, as George Will has said, it’s only a game, but “the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.”

One of the holes that Will considers unequal to baseball is obviously football, which in Will’s words “combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

George Will just isn’t a football type of guy, and that’s fine by me, because I’m not, either. It’s not the violence that rankles me — I can even sit and watch a boxing match on TV for a while. It’s the committee meetings part.

Football consists mainly of a bunch of grossly overweight guys standing around trying to catch their breath while waiting for the clock finally to restart so they can ply their trade for about six seconds, after which they’ll stand around for a while again. Look in on a game in which one of the teams uses a no-huddle offense and you’ll see all those huge millionaires on the defensive team sucking air after about a minute.

Anyway.

Those thoughts went through my mind the other day as I read about this clever idea for speeding football up a little and adding some really nteresting new strategic elements as well. Basically, one of the teams could call a “time-in” to get the clock going when it would otherwise be stopped, as it so often is. Nice. Fewer committee meetings. Never happen. But nice.

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