Edmund Burke’s reaction to the recent rule changes in sports today.
My news feed was covered in shared articles. It was like Kony 2012, but worse. What could have caused this massive influx of outraged teenagers? It could be none other than the recent NCAA changes to division I collegiate tennis; the fact that half of my facebook friends were tennis players had finally come back to haunt me. There had already been harsh reactions from many about the possibility of abolishing service lets about a year and a half ago, but additional new rules formed to speed up the play of matches have both high school, collegiate, and even professional players wondering what ridiculous rule changes are next. Now, I do not, nor will I ever, consider myself a conservative, but perhaps Burke was right in his reasoning in Reflections on the Revolution in France: change can be dangerous, leaving the institution it was trying to improve mutilated and almost unrecognizable.
Recently, we read an article by Marc Tracy in Political Science 101 in which the question was asked “When is football no longer football?” In this article, the recent changes in the rules of the NFL are discussed such as eliminating kick-offs in the Pro Bowl, banning ball carriers from lowering their helmets to avoid tackles, and eliminating tackling in preseason camps. By the end of Tracy’s column, readers are left questioning what makes football, well, football.
These changes and its reactions heavily reminded me of, as I like to call it, “the facebook incident of 2014” (see paragraph one). The articles that my friends had been sharing were about the change in formatting in NCAA tennis: the third set was to be replaced by a ten-point tiebreaker in singles, change-overs were to be shortened, pre-match warm ups were to be eliminated, and the eight game pro set was to be replaced by a regular six game set in doubles. These shifts have sparked much anger and controversy among the tennis community, especially in the USTA junior community. A huge part of tennis is the endurance required for the sport, both mentally and physically. Yet, these things are being taken away in an attempt to make tennis more widely attended by spectators. Not only are these changes disapproved by junior and professional players, but they also would have been frowned upon by Burke. These rules inhibit both the very structure of the sport itself, but the strategy of it as well. Instead of fighting through a second set to clinch the match, a player that has won the first set can simply give up the second knowing that he/she can just go through a ten minute tiebreak as opposed to an hour long third set to determine the match.
“Winning the first set means I can just sit here for the second and wait for the tiebreaker, right?”
Although the rule transitions mentioned in this post may be seen as Burkian by some, these people do not truly understand the gravity of these changes. The elimination of kick-offs, banning of using helmets to avoid tackles, and changing of scoring formats are not the small, incremental changes Burke was in favor of. They were the radical changes he warned us of. Although these recent rule developments may not be as big of a deal as the French Revolution, there is no doubt that an upheaval is occurring. There are big changes happening in sports today. How long will it be until the sports we all know and love turn into something unrecognizable?
Touchdown Theory 