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Like many of you I’m sure, I spent a lot of my last month watching the Men’s World Cup. One of the knockout games in particular — I don’t remember which and it doesn’t really matter — I was watching with some friends, and the game went to extra time. And if you watched the Cup, especially if you were already at a level of soccer fandom higher than the stereotypical American “tune in every 4 summers,” you would have noticed that FOX’s scorebug added a banner in extra time that said “No Golden Goal.” When it came up, one of my friends asked, “Who exactly is this for? Who is the hypothetical viewer who knows enough about soccer to know what a Golden Goal is, but not enough to know that FIFA doesn’t use it?” At the time, my response was basically American soccer moms and dads, whose primary exposure to soccer might be through their kids’ youth leagues that do decide overtimes via the hockey-style first-goal-wins system. Later, I remembered that in this particular case, “youth” once extended all the way through college — I say “once,” because at the same time, I remembered how pleased I was a couple of years ago to find that the NCAA had changed from its Golden Goal overtime format to the more traditional fixed overtime. I don’t know what possessed me to look it up, but imagine my surprise when I found out that two seasons ago, they flipped it back!
This got me thinking about some of the other ways that collegiate versions of rules differ regulationally from their professional counterparts. Not the size and skill of the athletes, nor the different schemes, systems, and strategies that derive from the size and skill differences, but the rules themselves. Sticking with soccer, besides the overtime, the most obvious difference is the clock counting down rather than up — which is a mechanic that the college game has correct, I might add. Something like unlimited substitutions makes sense because of larger roster sizes and college sports’ developmental lean. But the Golden Goal really sticks in my craw. The sport is about punches and counterpunches, so why is it that suddenly the losing team loses the ability to punch back?
There are of course other examples. Football people love to bring up how wide the hash marks are in college and how much that magnifies skill/athleticism differences in college compared to the NFL. Historically, their function might have been to cut the field in half and simplify reads and throws for college quarterbacks, but I think the college game is advanced enough and young quarterbacks are good enough that they probably provide too much of an advantage at this point. But I think my biggest pet peeve is that collegiate men’s basketball continues to be played in halves instead of quarters. Substantively, the only real change is the single-bonus double-bonus system, and that’s certainly part of my distaste (one-and-one free throws are silly), but even just aesthetically, it just feels wrong to me. It’s particularly galling that the women’s game is already played in quarters, so it’s not even an NCAA thing, it’s just men’s college basketball specifically diverging from the rest of the sport. And then there’s baseball, which is less different from MLB than it is behind — unrestricted shift, throws over to first, pitcher-batter minimums, that kind of thing. Well, other than the metal bats.
What’s your favorite quirk of college sports? Least favorite? Are my thoughts on basketball halves blasphemous? Please sound off!
