The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- October 26, 1998

Playing rules becoming bulkier, more administrative
as emphasis is placed on non-competitive matters

BY GARY T. BROWN
STAFF WRITER

Playing rules generally are black and white, right? The basket is 10-feet high, a first down is 10 yards and three strikes means you're out.

But what about the width of piping on a basketball jersey, artificial noisemakers in the stands, scoreboard requirements or the length of timeouts? Are those playing rules?

Or what about when a regular-season rule changes in postseason play because of the rule's impact on television exposure?

Shouldn't there be some consistency?

Those are the gray areas that make a playing rules committee's charge more colorful. And most of those groups have been made to feel that it's not enough anymore to regulate scoring, equipment specifications and duties of officials. Now there are sportsmanship issues, commercial logos and penalties for player ejections to worry about. And much like the NCAA Manuals, NCAA playing rules books are gaining weight because of it.

The result often is that a rules committee is left wondering where its jurisdiction ends and where another group's might begin. How far can a playing rule go in defining the "playing experience" for the participants? And how much can a rules committee trust that the intangibles of the game -- those gray areas of administering the contest that contribute to the quality of the experience -- will be regulated uniformly if they're not written down?

"If it's not in print, it may not be followed," said Sharon Drysdale, softball coach at Northwestern University, who chairs the NCAA Women's Softball Rules Committee. "We've had to make that decision to specify as much as possible, or it may not get done."

Conflict of interest

Some say that specifying as much as possible leads to another problem -- over-regulation -- or at least a potential for regulating rules for one venue that may not be the right fit at another.

Drysdale's group, the youngest of the Association's 14 committees assigned the difficult task of developing and maintaining rules of play for a given sport, ran into such a situation in 1997 when it wanted to stipulate that the eight-run-rule, which ends a game if a team has an eight-run lead after five innings, be a conduct rule and thus mandatory for all venues.

The Division I Women's Softball Committee, however, was reluctant to buy into such a restriction, having just watched the 1997 championship game be decided by such a rule, wiping out more than an hour of scheduled television time on ESPN.

Though the likelihood of a future championship game being decided by eight runs was remote, the softball committee didn't want to take that chance, so it asked that the rule be administrative in nature, which would allow the committee to waive it for subsequent championship games.

That brought to question the philosophy behind what constitutes a playing rule in the first place.

"If an eight-run rule is important, is it not important in championship play as well?" Drysdale said. "That's what we had to decide. The rules committee's belief was that a game is a game."

But the softball committee, which considers growing the championship as its top priority, felt that the lost television exposure was detrimental to the sport, and thus it placed a greater value on the championship game in terms of the playing rule in question.

"All games should be created equal," said Cindy Cohen, softball coach at Princeton University, who chaired the softball committee through 1997. "But truth be told, the championship committee wants to grow the event, and I don't know of a better way of doing that than television. And our fan base doesn't understand the concept of a game ending 'early.' You don't stop a football, baseball or basketball game just because one team is way ahead of another."

C. Cliff McCrath, men's soccer coach at Seattle Pacific University and long-time secretary rules editor of the Men's and Women's Soccer Rules Committee, said that scenario is a perfect example of when boundaries between committee jurisdiction blur. That's the time, he said, for each group to take a step back and see whether reality trumps philosophy.

"To a playing rule," McCrath said, "does one game count more than another? Yes, if the culture is marketing and promotion; no, if it's the intrinsic value of a game played without a crowd on a sandlot in some remote part of Turkey, Asia or the Yukon.

"If it's the latter, then the rule itself either restricts or releases the participants to enjoy whatever that intrinsic value is. If it's a contract with CBS or ESPN and potential damage to the marketability of the game, then you have to answer the other way. We'd like things to be black and white, but they aren't."

In the end, both the softball rules committee and the softball committee reached an agreement that the rule could, in fact, be waived for the championship game only, but it took both groups figuring out that they were stepping into each other's territories before a solution could be attained.

McCrath said soccer dealt with the game-importance issue in 1996 when the rules committee -- in the interest of shortening games while still determining a winner -- decreed that regular-season overtimes would be decided by sudden death instead of the traditional 30 extra minutes of soccer that could still end the match in a tie. Postseason games, however, still carried the two 15-minute overtimes followed by two 15-minute periods of sudden death.

The committee risked sending the message that, in effect, postseason games were more important and thus needed to be given every opportunity (that is, the most time) to determine the best team as the winner of the game.

McCrath said the committee believed that the sudden-death rule was a compromise between constituents who wanted sudden death for all games and those who wanted to eliminate overtime altogether in the regular season. And the committee didn't see the new rule as compromising the integrity of the game.

"There can be a point at which those decisions produce some dramatic alterations," McCrath said. "When offside was introduced in soccer in 1925, it altered the game forever. It went from a free-for-all where you played one defender and nine forwards -- where the ball would be kicked 70 yards and then nine guys would attack from various positions -- to a more orderly game.

But there were probably people back then who liked those kinds of brawls who said the rule change compromised the game.

"It's a very subtle thing, like trying to find some measurement for the thin line between love and hate. No one has come up with a clear measurement -- we just know that they're really close together. It's like the man who's been married for 50 years receiving a note from his wife that says, 'Dear Charlie, I hate you. Love, Martha.' "

Sportsmanship issues

In the early days of rules making, not so much was written about taunting, fighting, language abuse, misconduct and ethical play. Now, each committee with rules-making authority has developed its own fighting rules and penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct. Committees have been mandated by NCAA governance groups to focus on rules regarding language abuse and taunting.

Ed Bilik, athletics director at Springfield College and secretary-rules editor for the Men's Basketball Rules Committee, said those types of rules now take up a majority of a committee's time.

"Originally we dealt with playing rules," he said. "Now we are dealing more and more with administrative and behavioral rules -- what's legal in terms of uniforms, what kind of behavior should we have on the bench, what do you do about taunting. We've had to take on decisions that should be made either by the coach, the administration or event management."

In football, the rules committee in recent years has had to develop special rules for things that used to be non-issues, like praying in the end zone and excessive celebrations after big plays.

"Sportsmanship has become a top priority with the NCAA," Drysdale said. "Not only in terms of coaches' conduct, but athlete conduct. And that necessitates somebody developing a code of ethics with enforcement procedures and penalties. But trying to define it is difficult, as evidenced by the size of the NCAA Manuals."

Another challenge for Drysdale's committee in particular is that it was created only recently and followed years of existing rules designed for summer amateur play. Some of the committee's new rules regulated areas that schools weren't used to worrying about.

Suddenly, Drysdale said, warm-up areas, dugouts, bullpens, fences, batting cages, make-up games, contracts and scorekeepers were taking center stage instead of the size of the strike zone.

"Individual coaches were used to making those decisions themselves and modifying them based on their needs for a given game," she said.

Drysdale said the committee felt there needed to be some consistency in the playing experience for student-athletes at all venues. The backlash, though, was that regulating such consistency in some cases infringed upon an individual school's autonomy to administer the game.

"It's difficult to develop not necessarily an even playing field but at least an even starting point," Drysdale said. "That's where you get into questions of institutional autonomy. For instance, let's say we're playing basketball against Kentucky and they want to practice on our court. Do they get to say when?

"Maybe the question is whether certain rules are in the rule book, or whether they're just understood and followed by administrators like red and green lights."

Administrative rules

There is some relief in the issue of institutional autonomy in that many playing rules that deal with the preparation for the competition are dubbed "administrative" rules and therefore can be changed by mutual consent of the competing teams.

Some rules-makers would prefer that each rule -- whether it be administrative or conduct -- be exact for every venue to ensure an equal experience for every participant.

"If there were ultimate resources and unlimited pieces of land," said McCrath, "there wouldn't be any administrative rules because you'd say everyone has to have a scoreboard that's a minimum of this or that and everyone has to have a piece of ground that looks like this. You either build it or you don't play.

"But that opens a whole world of reality that says you can't build a rule of conduct beyond what is necessary to administer the game. There's some things that cannot be legislated. Whether there's a scoreboard doesn't mean you can't play the game."

Still, rules committees -- and sports committees -- don't deny the scoreboard is important. It's just that they can't always regulate it.

Drysdale said it has become increasingly difficult for a rules committee to map out those boundaries within such a complex topography.

But defining that line in the sand may be clearer now that expanded oversight responsibilities have been given to the division championships committees.

Both Divisions I and III (Division II is considering the proposal) have passed legislation that assigns the Division I Championships/Competition Cabinet and the Division III Championships Committee oversight authority over rules that affect an institution's ability to administer regular-season competition and/or the ability of a governing sports committee to administer NCAA championships competition.

Rules committees used to have to report to those groups only when proposed rules changes impacted player safety, financial issues or image of the sport.

Now, a proposal like the softball rules committee's eight-run rule as a conduct rule would end up in front of the championships groups for discussion.

Seen as another checkpoint in the communication loop, the new legislation sends the message that it is beneficial for rules committees and sports committees to be on the same page.

"Sometimes those two groups need to get together on the same issue," McCrath said. "A rule can be the gas pellet that fuels -- or kills -- the very experience of the sport.

"What if someone came along and told the runners in the Boston Marathon that when you turn right onto Huntington Avenue you have to stop at the stop sign because that's the rule -- the stop sign is there. Well, fortunately somebody else said that the policeman on the motorcycle there transcends the stop sign so you can keep going."

"Rules are, you think, black and white -- concrete -- but they're not," Drysdale said. "Rules are emotional. And everyone has a history with different rules, so they have strong feelings about one or another, and there's a feeling of control. It's especially difficult now in trying to define our legitimate realm. All we have to go by is what's come before."