The post-season baseball series have had a few issues with umpires, and even with extra umps on the field, mistakes are made. A long ball to left field is called foul when it was fair by a Texas mile. And baseball has no rules that provide for overturning the call. The home plate ump could’ve called that particular ball, for Pete's sake.
Our subject for today is football, not baseball, and commandments. After all, there are a lot of rules, or commandments, in football. And if you’re like Bill Cowher, former head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, you want to abide by the rules. That’s what he meant when he said, “We don’t want to circumcise the rules, or anything.”
I’m lifting this stuff directly from the Homiletics material for this coming Sunday. This is such great stuff, I want you to be sure to see some of it.
Football has so many rules that not even the players, coaches, referees and commentators can possibly know them all. That’s why football players can sometimes appear, well, a tad ignorant. Former Dallas Cowboy Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson once said of former Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who has four Super Bowl rings and now sits in the TV analyst booth, that he “couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted him the ‘c’ and the ‘a.’ ”
Football, unlike baseball, is arguably the most technologically advanced sport out there: You’ve got the radio receiver sending plays into the quarterback’s helmet from the sidelines, overhead cameras, super slow-mo video replay, challenge calls by the refs and computer-generated graphics on the field indicating “downs and distance” to the audience watching at home. …
But in one respect, things are a little more “old school”: determining where exactly the ball is supposed to be located and how far the offense has to move it for a first down. The way that’s done today is the way it’s been done since 1906 — the year the NCAA determined that a team needed 10 yards, not five, for a first down, and the year that the forward pass was legalized. Spalding’s Official Foot Ball Guide of 1907 set down the rules that have lasted for more than 100 years: “To assist in measuring the progress of the ball, it is desirable to provide two light poles about six feet in length, connected at their lower ends with a stout cord or chain 10 yards in length.” Thus, the “chain gang” was born.
Since then, at every football game from Pee Wees to pros, a group of officials stands about six feet off the sideline holding blaze-orange “poles” with a 10-yard length of chain stretched between them. One end is placed ostensibly at the football’s original spot, lined up by the official’s eyeballs with the nose of the ball (even though the ball itself may be more than 25 yards from the sideline). The other end marks the line to gain 10 yards away. When the play ends, an on-field official estimates the new spot of the ball, marking it with his foot and tossing the ball to another official to set for the next play. When the new spot is close to the first down end of the chain, that’s when the “chain gang” trots out to “measure” whether or not the offense gets a new set of downs.
Often, this is one of the most dramatic and breathless moments in a football game. Sometimes the drive continues by an inch; sometimes it comes up just a chain link short.
Now, you’d think with technological advances such as GPS and lasers it would be a no-brainer to figure out just where, in a pile of large, sweaty humans, the ball actually was when the running back’s knee hit the ground. Just put a computer chip in the ball or something. And if they can paint a virtual yellow line on the field to show the TV audience the yardage the offense has to gain for a first down, then surely they can figure out a way to do that on the turf itself, right?
Wrong …
And the material goes on from there to talk about the two yardsticks Jesus gives by which to measure forward progress.
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