Blogrule

Sports officials are always "cracking down" on something. In recent years, basketball refs have gotten tougher on carrying and other traveling violations. MLB umps are evidently looking more scrupulously at neighborhood plays. NFL officials are taking a closer look at ball control on end zone catches, which has already had a drastic effect on at least one game.

In college football, however, the hot-button issue for officials over the past few years has been sportsmanship. Now, I can't say I blame them when things like the "LeGarrette Punch" happen, but sportsmanship has to have a limit, a point at which winning becomes, if not desirable, at least acceptable. I don't know if the officials truly understand this, though. After watching the first couple scores of the UNC/ECU game Saturday, I felt like that game's refs expected the players to be ashamed of their successes.

In the first quarter of the game, both teams scored a touchdown and both teams subsequently scored an excessive celebration penalty, but neither of the scoring players or any of the offensive players really did much more than run around the end zone and maybe give a chest bump or two. Both were the sort of celebration you might see after a third-and-ten conversion. There weren't any cell phones, sharpies, or popcorn involved. Nobody inducted themselves into the Hall of Fame. There wasn't even a Dikembe Mutombo finger wag. All told, the celebrations were pretty lame.

After the second call, one of the ESPN announcers smartly called the two penalties "excessive officiating," which I'm willing to concede.

On their face, these calls are simply about sportsmanship and a (possibly antiquated) understanding about respect for the game. But there's also a free speech issue here, something that's come up in passing in some of my class discussions about different Englishes. I know that I just blogged about these discussions, but I love the fact that we're even having them and that my students seem legitimately interested in the outcome especially considering that free speech is essentially a necessity for any sort of successful university to actually exist.

At any rate, the most relevant question for this post is this: how do we draw the line between steadfast rules and space for creativity?

Or, considering all the emotion surrounding and infused in college football, would the game really be that much worse off with an occasional Lambeau Leap?

Event of the Week:

Halo 3: ODST launch on Tuesday. Maybe it's because I'm busier now and potentially less "tapped in," but this seems like the quietest Halo launch since, well, ever. Even the first one, which I'd barely heard of at the time, had a huge launch party since it was synonymous with the release of the original Xbox.