On Certainty and Illegal Substitutions

What will the philosophers make of that never played last second of the game?

Sorry to go off topic so early in the discussion, but on this Super Tuesday Eve, I’m in a situation I’m sure Professor Bérubé will understand. You see, I used to consider myself a Democrat, but since 9/11, I’m outraged by the U.S. media’s coverage of the Tet Offensive and, like John O’Sullivan, demand the Democratic candidates addresses this issue before tomorrow.

“Prior to the review, Belichick appeared to be asking the officials whether a player could be ruled ‘off the field’ if his body were in the air but had not fully broken the plane of the sideline, because Blackburn had indeed jumped to get off the field.”

If Belichick did not know whether someone in the airspace above the field was “off the field” or not, shouldn’t that have been his problem? If a ref gave Belichick a mid-game seminar explaining the rule, wasn’t that ref helping one side beat the other?

I think that it’s instructive that Wittgenstein never tried to explain the “involved in active play” clause of (real) football’s offside law.

Wittgenstein knew little about sport.

Berube jumps the shark.

And Marx is saying the ball was out.

Rob-
You’re a little wrong with the extra TV time-outs. The Redskins made a similar call when they beat the Giants (I think it was them) during the regular season.

There are guys up in the booth looking over replay for exactly those sorts of things.

Just the thought of Aikman saying “Wittgenstein” is enough to make my head explode.

Which is why Aikman always calls him “Wiggy” instead. Including on his half of the tattoo.

Anyway, Wittgenstein was a berk with a penchant for brandishing fireplace pokers, so we can naturally disregard everything he ever said about American football and moral rules.

Berube jumps the shark.

Hmm, could a professor be ruled as having “jumped the shark” if his body were in the air but had not fully broken the plane of the fin?

Good to see the right-thinking end up at roughly the same place on the map of the imagination.

In our soccer-involved household we were lampooning the hypertechnicality of football last night as illustrated by a potential key to the game being whether a player not involved in the play had barely made it across the sideline or not just before the ball was snapped.

and later in that thread: Very appealing for analytic philosophy types.

I think Buck and Aikman’s argument ranks up their with Tommy Lewis’s 1954 “you can’t cross the same sideline twice” demonstration and Roethlisberger’s Plane of the Goal Line Paradox from Super Bowl XL for great moments in football philosophy.

retired funny man Dennis Miller’s

As in Dennis Miller is still working, but he retired the funny a while back, I assume.

#16: the accounts I heard had Marx arguing offsides.

Unfortunately I missed that Aikman-Buck exchange in real time; was in the kitchen refreshing the guac and uncorking another bottle of chardonnay.

Off to read the Whole Thing now– thanks for your diligence, MB.

The pectoral fins have to be across the line. They’re kinda analogous to our knees.

As for underwear and Whole Foods:

http://outside.in/places/whole-foods-2-palo-alto

@11, as a Briton, I can only whoop with joy at the full content of that quoted para:

“Entering or enforcement of orders or decisions based on judgments, laws, agreements, or pronouncements of foreign institutions, governments, or multilateral organizations, other than orders or decisions based on the common law of the United Kingdom.”

Colonials! Colonials!!

They do realise Britain didn’t become the UK until 1801, a little *after* 1776?

But seriously folks, what about the bit in the Constitution where it says international treaties are the supreme law of the land…Like the UN Charter, for example?

There was a football game?

Berube jumps the shark.

Yes, but did the shark have two fins in bounds before I jumped over it? That’s the important question.

I submitted a jape much like this last night, only to be informed that my comment was in moderation. This morning, no sign of my comment, yet by sheerest coincidence “Professor” “Bérubé” comes up with a similar extremely hilarious vignette. I call shenanigans. Five yards. (Plus, my comment contained bonus previously-unreleased material about tattoos and fireplace pokers which made it even funnier.)

[T]he point here is what we call “the goal.”

My goal is to rid the world of TV networks–starting with Fox. Now, anyone have any ideas as to how we can pragmatically dismantle Fox? I’m listening.

By the way, I bet Wittgenstein would have liked watching the Super Bowl…

New England has a distinct identity for what? Suburbs, vacation homes, comic Irishmen, relics of the bygone Yankee past, Canuck illegals, private schools of all kinds, whiteness…..

“I was unaware that coaches could request reviews of plays (a) after the previous play had been completed”

Huh? It seems a bit extreme to expect a coach to predict the future before the whistle is blown. Reviews are *always* after the previous play and before the following play snap.

How is having to fully cross a line more exact than any part on a line? Don’t they just devolve into the same problem?

An observation only: this distinction between a hard and fast rule (Aikman’s position) and rules that should be interpreted in the spirit of the game (Buck) is one that distinguishes officiating in what Americans call soccer, everyone else, football from American football — in part. In soccer refereeing, the idea is to let the game get on, let them play, with minimal interference from the referee — the rules do not say you cannot kick or push another player, only that you cannot do so violently or in a way that secures, in the judgment applied by the referee, an unfair advantage that means something in the play then and there. So in this sense, Buck is entirely right, there should be no penalty here as the Giant’s player was clearly not part of the commencing play. But on technical matters, US football is officiated differently: technical matters are handled strictly. Untechnical matters, like linesmen “holding” are judgment calls on practically every play. Where US football also resembles soccer officiating (and basketball too) is when we get to rules that protect quarterbacks, such as the famous “in the grasp call” that altered a major game a couple of years ago, turning a fumble into a tackle. Officiating sports, in theory, rule practice is a highly complex matter, which does exhibit many of the issues that society faces everyday in governance. Cheers.

Oh, American oddball…

Michael:

Gregg Easterbrook called: He wants his shtick back.

Seriously, this reads like a more grammatically-correct TMQ, without cheerleader pix.

If I understand my Schroedinger–and I do not–then that final, unplayed second means that the Giants (and the Patriots) have both won and lost the Super Bowl.

Well it would be the same problem if the puck was carried across the line. So the real problem then is carrying the ball.

A lot of back and forth here, but it is good to know that there are still some pure sports out there like hockey (now that it has fixed the crease rule) where it is not possible for some trivial crap—the configuration of a piece of equipment for instance—to be pulled out in the middle of a Championship amd materially alter the outcome.

The Patriots website advises that “the season ended with an unfortunate result for the Patriots.” Kind of like Hirohito announcing that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

Very nice post. I hate to address the substance, but unfortunately I have no dazzling witticisms to share.

First, of course Joe’s reading of §88 is much better than Troy’s. (I like Joe’s line: “I do” – nice touch.) Troy needs to re-read that whole line of argument, going back to, say, §65, where Wittgenstein addresses what he sees as the main objection to his preceding discussion about naming: i.e., that he has helped himself to the idea of various “language-games” without specifying exactly what makes something “language” in the first place. So in §66 he introduces the famous example of “game” as a “family-resemblance” concept, and much of what follows discusses the senses in which particular games are constituted by rules. §88 is the culmination of that discussion, the moral of which is basically the last sentence of §87: “the sign-post [that is, the rule] is in order [is perfectly “exact” in the relevant sense]—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfills its purpose.”

Still, I think Joe’s comparison to hockey (and his reading of §88 in that context) is only partly successful. It’s fine to argue that the too-many-players rule in football is artificially exact, and that the criterion should be more as it is in hockey, i.e. that it should be invoked only when the player(s) in question are not “out of the play.” But as written, hockey’s Rule 17, while more appropriate by these lights, seems almost as “exact” in the disputed sense. It doesn’t just say “it’s okay if the player is out of the play”: it goes on to specify when that is, even going so far as to give a particular distance from the bench. The difference may have less to do with differing standards of exactness in general than with the fact that football, unlike hockey, is made up of distinct “plays” with appropriately specified beginnings and endings, which I’m surprised Troy didn’t bring up.

I see that the questionable point about goals and touchdowns has already been questioned, so I’ll refrain from questioning it further. The real question is: what would Wittgenstein say about the neighborhood play, the phantom tag, and the wide strike (none of which are in the rule book)?

Michael Bérubé, your imaginary discussion is very funny, and also insightful into the issue of applying rules. Thanks! A serious reply: rather than inferring that the difference in how substitution rules are applied in hockey vs football speaks to which game is better governed, isn’t it possible that the application of this rule in particular reflects the difference in how the games are intended to be played? Hockey is meant to be a very fluid game with lots of substitutions. Football is intended to be a stop-and-go game with fewer substitutions. Therefore, it makes sense for a football game to be governed with more precise attention to the legalities of substitution, and for issues of this sort to be reviewable. Wittgenstein’s point at §88 is that standards of precision should be appropriate to the intended effect of their application, and I think we can infer the same attitude towards whether or not to invoke them at all in various circumstances.

“Pettifogging”? “Pettifogging”?

I always knew that shifty-eyed Aikman was a foul-mouthed blackguard.

Properly civil football fans spent their Sunday watching the Boca-River SUPERclasico (Tivo’d the night before to fill the dearth of gentlemanly sport available the next day, of course).

What the discussion b/t Aikman and Buck is missing is that the rule, in its exactness, has led to further development of game strategy, literally making it a different game. New strategies based on this rule include variations on the no huddle offense where the offense snaps the ball much more quickly than expected in hopes of catching outgoing defensive men on the field (used to perfection a number of times by my U of Illinois team this year), and trick plays (usually punts), where the eleventh offensive player runs toward the sideline, appearing to try to get off the field, but stops just short of the line and turns downfield as a receiver when the ball is snapped (the Bears did this for a 40+ yard gain back in the early 90s). The debate doesn’t seem to be between the spirit and the letter of the rules, but what kind of a game the rules (and their enforcement) allow to be created. Loosely-called rules create different game conditions than strictly-called rules, which leads to a somewhat different game.

as University of California head coach Michael Fukolt suggested in 1977

It’s not often recognized that Coach Fukolt took his famous “eye in the sky” coaching tower idea from his bitter rival, MIT head coach Nathan “Natty” Chompers.

piggy-backing on indecisive’s comment: the exactness of the rule is relevant in football b/c of the strategy adaptation that follows. You always want to have the right players on the field at any given time, but there are rules relating to both the offense and the defense that govern the teams’ actions in this regard.

And the NFL also has pretty good adaptation of these rules. If you participate in the play as a 12th man, this is a 15 yard penalty and an automatic first down, I believe. So there is an appropriate distintion made between true cheating and just getting caught with your strategic pants down.

Finally, in football, breaking the front plane of the end zone is the appropriate distinguisher for a touchdown. The football is being carried, not struck across the line so it is usually easier to tell when the nose has crossed, not the back end cleared, the line. Furthermore, the rules lead to an easier discernment of the situation with regard to the pylons: if you touch a pylon with the football before going down, it is a touchdown.