Wimps in Connecticut. 50-point rule.

[JW]

So high school football coaches who win games by more than 50 points in Connecticut will henceforth be suspended for the next game. What a brilliant move.

I can see the following discussion next fall during a timeout in the 3rd quarter: "Okay, guys, we're up 49 to nothing now. Offense, you can't score any more. Smith, I know you're the third string quarterback and this is going to be the first action you've seen all year, but just take the snap and put a knee down. And defense, guys, if you intercept a pass or recover a fumble, just fall on the ball. Whatever you do, DO NOT TRY TO SCORE. Better yet, just let the other team score. Then we can let our subs actually run our offense."

The committee mentions the idea of making sure backups get enough playing time. But with absurdities like the above, it won't be real playing time. Do kids really want to go onto the field knowing the other team can't score without their coach getting suspended? Or that the other team just might let them score?

Dumb rule. There are better ways to handle this.

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/news/story?id=2457707

HARTFORD, Conn. -- High school football coaches in Connecticut will have to be good sports this fall -- or risk a suspension.



The football committee of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs high school sports, is adopting a "score management" policy that will suspend coaches whose teams win by more than 50 points.



A rout is considered an unsportsmanlike infraction and the coach of the offending team will be disqualified from coaching the next game, said Tony Mosa, assistant executive director of the Cheshire, Conn.-based conference.



"We were concerned with any coach running up the game. There's no need for it," Mosa said. "This is something that we really have been discussing for the last couple of years. There were a number of games that were played where the difference of scores were 60 points or more. It's not focused on any one particular person."



Some have dubbed it the "Jack Cochran rule," after the New London High football coach, who logged four wins of more than 50 points last year. In New London's 60-0 rout of Tourtelotte/Ellis Tech, Cochran enraged the Tourtelotte bench by calling a timeout just before halftime. Tourtelotte's coach was arrested on breach of peace charges after police say he struck a security guard and an assistant New London coach.



Leo Facchini, New London's athletic director, called it unfair to single out his coach.



Facchini said he and Cochran tried to pull in the reins during New London's 90-0 drubbing of Griswold last season by trying to get both sides and the timekeeper to agree to run a continuous clock.



Some states, including Iowa, continuously run the game clock in the second half if a team has a 35-point lead. The Connecticut committee rejected a similar proposal because members thought it would unfairly cut into backups' playing time.

[Mustang]

I'd use a word for them but, it isn't wimps.

More along the 'P' variety....

[TroyF]

My favorite part of this:

Some states, including Iowa, continuously run the game clock in the second half if a team has a 35-point lead. The Connecticut committee rejected a similar proposal because members thought it would unfairly cut into backups' playing time.

And telling your 3rd stringers they can't score or play aggressively isn't cutting into their playing time?

That said, if this asshat is actually calling TO's at the end of a half when up by 45, that should stop.

[IwasHere]

I would much rather see a Mercy rule put up instead of this kind of crap. In H.S. you will run across games where one opponent completely outranks another. Should they fire the school's athletic Director for scheduling the game?

[WSUCougar]

That's it. I'm never going to a Connecticut HS football game again.

[Mustang]

"Save my job!!!! Get it under 50!!! Take a safety!!! Take a safety!!!"

[IwasHere]

Simple. You send out your kicker and only your kicker on Kickoffs.

[Toddzilla]

Fuck that - 1 game suspension? If I'm the coach, I'm running the score WAY up on purpose. If I'm going to be out a game, then my backups are going to get quality time. 150-0, I don't give a shit. I don't need to hold my guys back, the other team needs to suck less.

[sachmo71]

Found the testosterone pool!

[GreenMonster]

Did anyone hear the Mike and Mike story about James Blake forgetting to rent a suit for prom.. He said he used to lay off totally killing kids in highschool.. He forgot to rent a suit for prom, so before the match started on prom day he approached the net and apologized in advance for the beating he was about to dish out.. The match ended in 13 minutes and prom was saved..

[BrianD]

Wisconsin has the running-clock mercy rule, and that seems to work quite well. When one team puts backup players in, the other team usually does the same. If the backups are similarly unbalanced, you still end up with a long game and a very high score. I'd rather just see the game end quickly.

[Poli]

Simple. You send out your kicker and only your kicker on Kickoffs.

I like it. If they "make" you have 11 players...fine. Have the other 10 sit on their butts.

[Toddzilla]

OK - If you are on the receiving end of a 49-0 ass-beating, do you purposely take a safety to push the score over 50 and get the other coach suspended?

[Poli]

OK - If you are on the receiving end of a 49-0 ass-beating, do you purposely take a safety to push the score over 50 and get the other coach suspended?

Not intentionally. But who can control a bad snap to the punter?

[kcchief19]

How about this -- If you score to go up by more than 50, you can't run another play on offense until you are down by less than 50. If the losing team turns the ball over on a turnover or loss of dows, they get the ball back at their 20.

Of course, I think a better idea would be if high schools adopted a relegation format instead of classification by size. If a team is good enough to beat up similar size teams in a small class, move them up a class until they start playing some teams that are on the same skill level.

[rkmsuf]

Martha Stewart must somehow be behind this.

[Solecismic]

I'm guessing nobody on this competition committee has ever coached football.

Kids are much more likely to get hurt when they're not trying their hardest to succeed.

I'm wondering what message they're trying to send here. If you've ever played a sport, you know when your opponent is a lot better. When I played tennis in college, I absorbed a few good beatings. Nothing was more frustrating than the ranked player who went up 5-0 and started dicking around to give me a game. I wanted to kill him.

There's a difference between running up the score and simply being the better team. If it isn't patently obvious to you, you have no business serving on a competition committee for anything more strenuous than a ping-pong tournament.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Of course, I think a better idea would be if high schools adopted a relegation format instead of classification by size. If a team is good enough to beat up similar size teams in a small class, move them up a class until they start playing some teams that are on the same skill level.

I've heard worse ideas in theory but there's problems with the idea because of the volatile nature of squads at this level.

While there are some perennial powerhouses in the lower levels in Georgia, there's also cases like a team down on the coast a few years back who went unbeaten in the regular season & allowed something like 12 points all season (but lost in the 1st round of the playoffs IIRC) one year & then finished like 2-8 the following year. Their graduation losses pretty much wiped out the team after their stellar season & they went right back to a normal level after that. It could also create a situation where teams could be better served by tanking some non-region games during the regular season in order to avoid
being forced up (if the criteria for promotion included total wins over multiple seasons or similar).

And, at least in some states, there's cases where bumping a team up or down a level could create major havoc with scheduling, travel, and budgets. We already have some bad situations trying to organize the 8 regions within 5 classifications when most of the largest schools are in the north and only a few are in the south, with the reverse problem for the smallest schools.

I think the promotion/relegation system is one of those things that doesn't sound too bad on paper but in reality might prove pretty unworkable (at least with the number of teams & geography here)

[Wolfpack]

Maybe you can take away some of the volatility by having a running average of some kind over X number of years? Still leaves the geographic problem, though.

Edit to add: also neglects problems with new schools added to the system. New schools likely would be in major metro areas, so it makes no sense to put them in the lowest class and make them work up.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Maybe you can take away some of the volatility by having a running average of some kind over X number of years?

But that's what I alluded to earlier, you create a situation where teams will be better served by tanking their non-region games (which don't affect their playoff seeding except in odd cases where they become part of a tiebreaker) to avoid raising their average to whatever the cut-off level is. And that doesn't really seem like a desirable situation, certainly it's less desirable than what currently exists.

Maybe you can take away some of the volatility by having a running average of some kind over X number of years? Still leaves the geographic problem, though.

Yep. And in larger landmass states that geography can be a killer. We're already dealing with teams playing region (think "conference") games that are 3 hours away by bus, and those are regular season contests, never mind what the playoffs are like.

also neglects problems with new schools added to the system. New schools likely would be in major metro areas, so it makes no sense to put them in the lowest class and make them work up.

Even the very location of those major metro areas creates problems when you have most of the population in the northern 1/3rd of the state and then 2 relatively large cities in the extreme SE & WSW part of the state.

[thealmighty]

When you say high school teams should be moved up/down a tier, you are forgetting the other two dozen sports (or however many a state sanctions). What if a school has a killer football team and crappy other sports? It would be a bigger mess than FEMA trying to classify each sport for every school.

[Mustang]

Why aren't other sports put under the same rules?

"Ok Sally, when you dismount from the uneven bars, you'll need to make sure you stumble a little bit so you get some points subtracted.... don't want to show every one up now...."

[sabotai]

When I played football in high school, we knew when we were facing a team much better than us, so losing by 50 or more didn't really effect us. We knew who would kill us and who we'd have a game against.

Hell, if we lost to Paulsboro by less than 50, that was a moral victory. :D

[stevew]

A one size fits all approach is a horrible rule in this situation. Some teams are just so good, that they could kill the other team with their 4th stringers. If the coach at least attempts to empty his bench, and give some of his younger kids some PT, I think suspending him by winning by more than 50 is silly.

If it's a situation where you have some douchebag coach playing his first string when the score is 49-0 in the 3rd quarter, then yeah, suspend his ass, cause he doesn't get it. Sportsmanship should dictate to you that attempting to outright embarass the other outmanned team is poor form. It's not the NFL, everyone who does the work in practice should get a shot in a blowout type game.

Now if you only have like 35 kids on your team, and you're rolling people, then I don't know what to do. Maybe schedule better in the future.

[ScottVib]

This story may not be finished. It was passed without the input of the coaches and the coaches universally are against it. Its a rule that certainly seems pointed at a particular coach (who won a game 90-0 last year and has a history of playing his starters late into blowouts).

One of the points that was raised was the increased liklihood of injuries in cases where players are "letting up" or where you have completely overmatched kids in the game against the other teams starters to try and keep the game close.

In Connecticut some teams that are designated Class S or SS (the smaller classes) can be better then the teams from the "higher divisions" as they are grouped strictly on population. For example in the 90-0 game it was a S school (smallest division) beating a team from the next higher division. Most of the conferences are mixed classes so there are conferences who run the entire 6 tiered spectrum (from LL to S).

Excerpted from today's Hartford Courant:
http://www.courant.com/sports/highschool/hc-hsfbrule0526.artmay26,0,2257233.story?coll=hc-headlines-sports


"I support what came out of the committee because I'm a member of the committee [which also includes school administrators]," Filippone said. "I couldn't be there that day. That doesn't excuse me from being a part of that committee and supporting their action. I do support the rule as it's written.

"However, [based] on literally 40 or 50 conversations I've had with my colleagues in coaching, all consistently say they don't like it, they're not comfortable with it, they wish we could do something different. They believe in the spirit of the rule, but they don't think it's the right way to go about doing it. My job is to represent those coaches."

John Fontana, executive director of the CHSCA, asked Filippone to request the meeting with the CIAC. Filippone said he left a message Thursday for CIAC assistant executive director Tony Mosa, who is the liaison to the football committee, about a meeting.

Fontana said the coaches association and the CIAC have a working arrangement in which any new rule, small or big, is brought to the CHSCA before being voted on in a CIAC committee. This rule was not presented to the CHSCA, Fontana said.

The CIAC looked at the rule, which Filippone said had been discussed "on and off'" for the past two years, as a minor change. Filippone said it had never come up for a vote.

"How can such a relatively minor sports story take on such wide press coverage?" said Mosa, who Thursday afternoon said he was unaware of Filippone's request for a meeting. "I don't think it rises to the level that people project it to be."

"I think Tony Mosa has a different interpretation of what has to go in front of the coaches association," Filippone said. "That may well be part of what we need to discuss. Even if what might be considered small changes don't have to go in front of the coaches association executive board, if that's true, this has transcended that now and become a big issue."

Mosa said there was a pressing sense within the football committee and among CIAC board members to get something done on the issue at the April meeting.

"Our CIAC board has received letters and inquiries from superintendents and principals wondering what was going on and asking us quite frankly to investigate it and do something about it," Mosa said. "Some of that impetus came from our own membership."

Teams won games by 50 or more points 27 times out of 659 scores reported during the 2005 season.

Some have characterized this as the "Jack Cochran rule," referring to the New London coach whose teams last year defeated opponents by 55 or more points four times, including a 90-0 victory over Griswold. Cochran also earned a reputation for big scoring margins at Bloomfield and New Britain, where he won a combined seven state titles.

"We handle [score management] appropriately in 99 percent of the cases," Filippone said. "I think a great example is a great coach who is on our committee, Marce Petroccio [of Staples-Westport] would have had to sit out two games last year. He wasn't trying to run the score up. It would affect a lot of guys.

"Is it going to bring people in that don't deserve to be in the way it's written right now? It probably will. I know the guys that I coach with, they are not the type of guys who are ever going to tell a young kid, `You know what? You've got to fall down'; `You know what? Run out of bounds'; or `You know what? We're going to punt the ball on second down.' To me, that would be more humiliating [for the losing team] than having them score an extra two touchdowns."

"It's only those rare occasions you have to reflect on, that one game last year with 90 points. Fifty points, I'm uncomfortable with that myself, but 90 points, you can't explain that to me in a way that makes sense."

If Filippone meets with the CIAC, he said he'll "present the data related to the reaction of our coaches."

Said Filippone: "I think it's the job of the football committee to sit down, look at that data and say, OK do we move on it immediately to change it or did we come to a good conclusion, we're going to stick to our guns and we're going to run this thing for a year and see how it works out.

"Let's see how many games we have to deal with, let's see how much trouble we have. If we don't have to change it, maybe we won't. If it becomes a really big problem, we go back and amend it.

"Because of the outcry on this there is the potential for it to move quicker than that. I wouldn't say it would be likely that it would move quicker than that because there's a procedure and ways to get things done."

[ScottVib]

"Ok Sally, when you dismount from the uneven bars, you'll need to make sure you stumble a little bit so you get some points subtracted.... don't want to show every one up now...."

There are mercy rules in baseball and softball where if you are up by X amount after the losing team has 5 at bats the game is called.

[Abe Sargent]

If it isn't patently obvious to you, you have no business serving on a competition committee for anything more strenuous than a ping-pong tournament.


Hey now, I don't want these guys mucking about my table tennis tourneys. :(

-Anxiety

[Julio Riddols]

I'd use a word for them but, it isn't wimps.

More along the 'P' variety....

Connecticut Pimps, man.. Cozzizle Pizzle.

[EagleFan]

There are mercy rules in baseball and softball where if you are up by X amount after the losing team has 5 at bats the game is called.

That's a lot different than continuing the game and telling them they can't try anymore.

If they are going to do this, then why not have a 50 point mercy rule instead.

[Young Drachma]

http://ishouldstudymore.net/27/2006/05/25/apparently-there-is-crying-in-football/

[BishopMVP]

In Massachusetts sports, at least for lacrosse which I'm most familiar with, teams are allowed to move up however many divisions they want for any particular sports playoffs. Makes a lot more sense than promotion/relegation where a team might just be senior-laden one year and led by underclassmen the next.

Personally, I agree with others when I say I'd rather my opponent keep playing hard than let up to give me a goal here and there.

[IwasHere]

Personally, I agree with others when I say I'd rather my opponent keep playing hard than let up to give me a goal here and there.
But, why continue to play the game? I think all H.S. sports should have some type of mercy rule.


And, why are they targetting football. After all the H.S. basketball stories I read last year about teams and players scoring over 100 points when they left their starters in for the entire game I think H.S. Basketball needs this ruling a lot more than football.

[Desnudo]

That's it. I'm never going to a Connecticut HS football game again.

That's it, I'm never going to Connecticut again.