Common Sense Is Out The Window. Science Killed It. It Will Also Bring It Back.
All over sports radio, just about everybody is weighing in on the end of the BYU-Washington game. Jake Locker, quarterback for the Washington Huskies, ran the ball in for a touchdown with two seconds on the clock, bringing the score to 28-27, BYU still on top, with only a routine PAT between Washington and overtime. Needless to say, Jake was excited - he just saved the game for Washington, after all - so, in a fit of passion, he tossed the ball over his shoulders and began cheering with his teammates.
Then came the flag. Unsportsmanlike conduct. Excessive celebration. 15 yard penalty. Suddenly, a routine PAT became a less-than-routine 35 yard PAT attempt. BYU blocks it. Game over.
Here’s the video:
There are two schools of thought regarding what happened that day:
- The Pac-10 version (the game was at Washington, so it was officiated by Pac-10 referees) is that, according to the rules of the game, the referee did precisely what he was supposed to do.
- The common sense version is that, yeah, rules are rules, but there has to be some flexibility, some interpretation.
The truth is, the refs did the right thing. Their job is to enforce the rules of the game. According to the 2008 NCAA Football Rules and Interpretations (note - it’s a PDF), Rule 9, Section 2, Article 2c:
2. After a score or any other play, the player in possession immediately
must return the ball to an official or leave it near the dead-ball spot.
This prohibits:
(a) Kicking, throwing, spinning or carrying (including off of the
field) the ball any distance that requires an official to retrieve it.
(b) Spiking the ball to the ground [Exception: A forward pass to
conserve time (Rule 7-3-2-d)].
(c) Throwing the ball high into the air.
(d) Any other unsportsmanlike act or actions that delay the game.
Did Locker return the ball to the official? No. Did he leave it near the dead-ball spot? No. That, in and of itself, means he was in violation of the rule, which means that the ref, according to the rules, had to enforce the following penalty:
PENALTY—Dead-ball foul or live-ball foul treated as dead-ball foul.
15 yards [S7 and S27] from the succeeding spot. Flagrant
offenders, if players or substitutes, shall be disqualified
[S47]. If a player or an identified squad member in uniform
commits two unsportsmanlike fouls in the same game, he
shall be disqualified.
There it is - 15 yards, first offense. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. The rule is what it is. The referees aren’t supposed to enforce the rules based on their own personal whims - they’re supposed to enforce the rules equally and consistently. That’s what we call fair these days.
Therein lies the problem.
At some point in recent history, we stopped assuming that humans were irrational and consequently needed to be dealt with flexibly. We, as a society, collectively decided that flexibility was inherently unjust - why should the rules be applied one way with one person, then applied entirely differently with another person? Why should the rules be applied one way in one circumstance, yet applied differently in a slightly different circumstance? This, I suspect, was the direct result of the recent stressing of math and science in education, with a lowering of importance for art, music, and literature. With art, music, and literature, there is no one right way to do things. When there’s a method, there are ways to work around it, or subvert it entirely. With math and science, however, at least the way it’s taught, there’s only one right way to do things. When you add 2 and 2, you get 4. You do that by adding the quantity of 2 to another quantity of 2. There is no other way. There is no other answer. Even if you get higher-level and start throwing in different bases, yeah, you might be able to say the answer is actually 11 (base 3), but it still represents the exact same quantity represented by 4. You’re just labeling it differently.
With this idea firmly implanted into the fabric of modern society, it’s no wonder we want rules to be interpreted as IF…THEN statements. It’s so much more scientific, more methodical, more enlightened. It’s perfectly logical. If I break a rule, then I should get punished. Equally importantly, if you break the same rule, then you should get punished the same way. Simple. Logical. Pure. There’s just one problem. Conditional statements work great with computers because they’re deterministic, which is a really fancy way of saying that, in theory, if you feed the same data and the same program to the same computer, you will always get the same answer because the computer will always take the same steps each and every time to get there.
Try that with a person.
Heck, try that with a real computer. Real computers exist in the real world, which means that they’re bound by the exact same real-world forces that we are. Thus, they’re victim to real-world problems like electrical shorts, manufacturing defects, heat, theft, water, and so on. Any of these real-world problems will change the computer’s answer because it changes the program, the data, or quite probably both. People are even less deterministic. In fact, even in mathematics, there’s a term for this - it’s called non-determinism. For example, think of a shopping list. The data is simple enough - milk, eggs, meat, cheese, vegetables. Does it matter what order we put them in the basket? Probably not. You might be able to optimize somewhat - perhaps the milk and eggs are next to each other, so getting them one after the other is a good idea. However, there might be more than one optimal solution. There might be no optimal solutions - if you only have 30 minutes to get your groceries and the cashiers are taking 35 minutes to check people out, you’re in trouble.
Somewhere along the way, our society chose to forget that. It’s understandable - about 50 years ago or so, the best minds in the world largely forgot that. That’s how, at one point, people decided that the best method of flood control was something simple, something methodical, something scientific - pave over rivers with concrete, raise the channels nice and high, then watch the river flow as fast as possible to sea. Makes perfect sense, at least on paper. Trouble is, the system only works well when nature brings in rainfall within the design parameters of those concrete channels, when people aren’t dumping stuff into the channels that alters their flows, when trees aren’t falling in, and so on. None of these factors are even remotely guaranteed - on the contrary, each of these problems is guaranteed to happen at least once, at which point the entire system will fail. The best minds in the world figured that out fairly quickly, which is why they’re playing with Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, and String Theory, all of which are non-deterministic. Society as a whole, however, tends to take a little more time to learn. There has to be something to replace the old paradigm, something for the rest of the world to latch on to that they can use to get useful things done. The trouble with new ways of thought at any point in time is that, being new, they have few known practical uses, at least at first. Turing machines, for example, were nearly pointless theoretical exercises in 1936. Now, they’re a core foundational concept for computer science students. Quantum mechanics is, for 99.9% of the world, a nearly pointless and incomprehensible theoretical exercise. Soon, however - very soon - it will become the basis of modern computing. However, it took over 100 years and proving Einstein wrong (like I said, 50 years ago or so, the best minds in the world thought the world was deterministic) in order to get to a point where we will soon have a practical application of a theory that few currently understand at even the most basic level. This means that people will need to be able to work on these devices, which means bright minds will need to simplify, or ‘dumb down’ quantum mechanics enough for less bright people to be able to work on their clever machines.
Does the kid at Jiffy Lube need to know about hydrodynamics to change your oil? Does the guy at the big box computer store need to know about Ohm’s Law in order to remove the virus from your computer? Of course not. Do the products that they’re working on rely on these principles, among others to work properly? Yes, but it doesn’t matter - none of those details will help you troubleshoot those devices enough to make learning more than the most basic concepts behind those ideas worth learning. But, you will learn the basic ideas behind those principles - you’ll learn a distilled, simplified form of those ideas, sure, but you’ll know them just the same. You’ll know that, if you change the oil of a car that’s been running for a while, the oil will be hotter than if the car sits for a while, and you’ll know that the oil will come out of the block faster if it’s hotter. You’ll know that, if you have a 250 watt power supply in your computer, and you have a bunch of devices in it that draw more than 250 watts, your computer won’t function. In the same vein, people will learn that their computer works just as well off as it does when it’s on. People will learn that, with their new computers, given the same data and the same program, their computer can give them entirely different answers at random.
At that point, in order to fully grasp and utilize these ideas, we will need to change how we teach our children - we will need to teach them that the world, even in theory, is not deterministic. Once they grasp that, the idea that humans are deterministic will seem as quaint and silly as the idea that skin pigment has a strong, direct correlation to intelligence does today. Suddenly, zero-tolerance rules, explicitly designed to turn school administration into an exercise in pure determinism, will disappear in the new paradigm. Workplace rules that treat humans like robots will disappear - if even your robots are non-deterministic, why would you expect your humans to be any different?
Then, finally, referees will be able to call a football game with some semblance of independent judgment, and everybody will understand why.
rants | David Colborne | 
September 8, 2008 11:31 pm
3 Comments
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By James, September 9, 2008 @ 3:55 pm
In that case, the Raiders should have beat the Patriots and the “tuck” rule is a sham. Or better yet, do away with 4th and inches, just give the team the first down for trying. How about we get rid of the score and give everyone a trophy for showing up?
There are certain things in life that need defined rules. Sports (espically football) is one of those. Had a TO, Randy Moss, or Chad Johnson got away with that without penalty or fine, the media would have a field day. Of course if it was Manning or Brady, the media would be up in arms that it was “unsportsmanlike”.
By James, September 9, 2008 @ 7:41 pm
I take it back. I just heard some more about it on ESPN radio. The ref’s need to enforce the rules or throw the rules out. After hearing about. These Pac-10 refs did their job, sounds like others need to follow.
By Cardoza, September 13, 2008 @ 4:45 pm
Got to agree with James on this one. You know how I feel about displays like that anyway, and if I were the ref I’d have done the same thing, even if it was against BYU, whom I hate unconditionally. It’s also one of those things where it is well known that the NCAA has a zero-tolerance policy, infractions are hammered every time, and doing it anyway, even amongst intoxicating jubilation, is just flat out stupid on his part. And, no, you really can’t have flexibility enforcing the rules of a game (it is a game, after all, and rules define the game itself) or else you end up with crap like the Texas Tech game last week..far less good comes of it in the long run.