Thanks for joining me!
As long as I can remember, I’ve been a sports fan. I’ve played them, watched them, followed my teams and favorite players, wept, yelled, screamed, jumped with joy, crumbled in defeat, won, lost, suffered, and paraded in glorious victory. And that was just the third inning.
Today is a new day, and I have no doubt that, just as all the days before, the game will turn on that one call, made at just the right time to catalyze a rapid change in momentum, and fortunes built on hard-earned progress will be dramatically reversed in the blink of an eye.
The emotional roller coaster is the plight of every sports fan. And while it would be a shame to take all the emotion out of watching, I hope to be able to assuage you of the anguish of feeling like your team was the recipient of a bad call, but not really KNOWING if they were.
This blog will take a look around the sports world and give you an opinion based on legal analysis of the rules, a logical perspective surrounding the situations, and will do so with the intention of making the often complex easily digestible. Most importantly, this is a discussion. I invite your comments, ideas, and participation. I can’t watch every game, every day, so I encourage you to send in your ideas for future posts.
Bear in mind that, just as with decisions in the courts of law, reasonable minds can always disagree. Often times a referee must make a judgment in the heat of the moment on something as subjective as “full control of the ball.” It’s not easy, and unlike those courts of law, sports officials have mere seconds or minutes to take in all the available evidence and issue a holding.
Now, let’s take the field!
The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they do not know the game. — Bill Shankly
Restatement of Sports 