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.

The real question is not whether the Patriots should be from “New England” (or “Northeast Region”), but why the Giants are said to be from “New York” when, well, they aren’t.

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.

Did I make you look?

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).

Some rules require a sophisticated understanding of the game. The most famous example is the offside rule in soccer. After defining what it means for a player to be “in the offside position,” the rule continues:

A player in an offside position is only penalised if, at the moment the ball touches or is played by one of his team, he is, in the opinion of the referee, involved in active play by:

interfering with play
interfering with an opponent
gaining an advantage by being in that position

http://www.offside-ref.co.uk/laws/11-offside-rule/detailed/

You can see by the offside rule, it is possible to distinguish between the two kinds of rules within the rule itself.

Note that the offside rule gives rise to more arguments than just about anything else in soccer. It’s pretty generally agreed that the rule is a problem. If it were possible to create an offside rule that didn’t require judgment, soccer would do it. The need for judgment is a flaw in the game—not a disaster, but a flaw.

So one should assume that the writers of the rule book understand the considerations and are capable of indicating how a given rule should be applied. If they decide not to call for judgment, then presumably they decided that mechanical application is better for the game. Obviously judgment is necessary as to whether the literal requirement of the rule is satisfied, but judgment regarding the nature or purpose of the rule is not called for.

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)?

Like Old England not getting a try against South Africa in the World Cup final.

With the additional complication that a try, unlike a touchdown, requires a touchdown, so the precise coordinates of the ball as well as the leg both matter.