Semi-OT: What sports would you fix?

Basketball: Any time a player cocks the ball into his arm like it's a football, instant traveling.  I mean, you don't actually need to change the rules, you just need to stop letting players travel, since that is the exact situation that traveling is supposed to prevent.

Soccer: No offside when the ball is in the penalty area (and the would-be offside player got there after the ball did).  For God's sake make teams actually play defense.

Hockey: Move the blue lines closer to the red line (the "inner" blue lines") and add a second pair of blue lines (the "outer" blue lines) near the faceoff circles.  Puck is not in the zone til it crosses the outer blue lines and does not leave the zone until it crosses the inner blue lines.  This concept already exists as well, because the puck has to cross the whole blue line before it moves from one area to the other, so it would be just like having a 10-foot-thick blue line.  Creates more space to operate everywhere on the ice without physically expanding the rink.

1. If you don't make the super bowl in a 50 year span, you lose your team.

2. 3 point line in basketball would be moved back to 30 feet (or farther).

3. Owners of all professional sports would have to fully disclose all financial results. These results would be cleaned of all inter-business transfers and all accounting magic.

Gross, expenditures related directly to baseball, etc..

Sadly, none of these will ever happen.

Baseball-

Relief pitchers that come in mid-inning get 30 seconds from the time they step on the mound to throw two warmup pitches.  There is a bullpen to get ready in.  

To keep brawls from happening, suspend anyone that comes off the bench during an altercation.  If the batter wants to charge, he is going to be outnumbered.  Will stop a lot of the nonsense.

Both leagues get a DH, but once your pitcher hits a batter, you lose your DH and the pitcher must hit.

Increase roster size to 27, but each team must designate 5 pitchers prior to the game, and no other player may pitch.  If the game goes extra innings, teams will add another pitcher to that list after the 9th, 11th, 13th, 15th, etc.

College Football-

Officials are graded by their Conference and those grades are released to the public.

16 Team playoff to match the lower divisions.

TV timeouts like college hoops, at certain time marks in the game.  First whistle after every 5 mins per quarter?

College Hoops-

Officials graded by their Conference and those grades are released to the public.

Any team foul committed behind the halfcourt line is 2 FTs by any offensive player, and the ball.  Same goes for any non-shooting team foul in the last 2 mins of regulation or OT.

If a coach wanders onto the court, even by an inch, its a Technical.  Tired of seeing coaches in the player's space.

Block/charge needs to be fixed.  It should be 50/50, whoever gets to a spot first owns the spot.  Defender does not need to be statue set, he just needs to have his body in the spot before the offensive player does.

Soccer-

Get rid of offsides.  Its bogus that a legit defensive strategy could be to move away from the goal you are defending.

If you play is stopped for more than 30 seconds due to injury, you must be really hurt, and you are now done for the rest of the game.

Leagues review potential flops postgame.  If the league deems that you undeniably flopped, your team loses one goal from the final score.  Game results can be overturned accordingly.

MLB: FEWER GAMES IN THE SCHEDULE. MANY FEWER GAMES.

Basketball: replace free throws with power plays. If a player commits a foul that would result in free throws, his team is shorthanded for one full shot clock or until the other team scores. Power plays could be timed or untimed depending on what would benefit the team that was fouled. Unlike hockey, there would be no limit to how many players one team could be down. Basketball power plays would produce more action and less standing around, and they would help cut down on the nuisance of intentional late-game fouling.

Hockey: fire Gary Bettman.

(Also, as someone else already noted, replay in all sports should be in real time. No slow motion.)

I hate baseball, but would change MLB to far fewer games. It's a joke they play 162 games. I would also 86 the RIDICULOUS under two minute automatic review in basketball. It's fucking stupid and overused.

A few fixes...

1)  Get rid of the umpire for balls and strikes.  Let computers do that.  The ump should just be there to call other rules.

2) Reduce number of games.  Will never happen, I know. $

3) Stop with the pinch runners.  I mean, that's like cheating man.  (Same could be said for pinch hitters, but that's too engrained.)

One positive aspect:  I do like baseball's playoff qualifiction stringency.  Unlike NBA and NHL where half the leauge gets into the playoffs, MLB makes it tough to make playoffs.  NFL does it well in this regard too.

My three:

Basketball (college and pro) - start calling intentional fouls as flagrants.  Stop the end of game foul fests that make the last minute thirty of any game all but unwatchable, and basically never impacts the outcome.  Get rid of instant replay except for 3 points versus 2, and even then only do replays during naturally occurring  time outs- it's very rarely necessary and often ruins games by slowing them down to unwatchability

Football - have full time professional referees, and hold them accountable for mistakes (whether by fines, relegation from TV, whatever).  Call targeting when an offensive player lowers their head to impact a defensive player.  Don't call targeting if a defensive player is going for a clean hit and the offensive player moves his head.  

Soccer -  Shrink the field in half.  Eliminate offsides.  Ban guys for life for flopping (okay, maybe just automatic red card, and allow post-match review of all "injuries" and if review determines it was a flop, that guy is banned for next match).  Learn how a stopwatch works and get rid of the dumbass made up "stoppage time" thing.   Play overtime like a real sport, don't have a glorified three point contest to decide a game - if there's still a tie after OT, then fine, shootout, but only then, and never in a major international tournament. In general, do literally anything to make the sport actually watchable - the cool shit in soccer is really cool, but it's surrounded by several hours of literally nothing happening, and while this is to a lesser degree true of football, in football there's always the possibility or threat of something cool happening, whereas the majority of a soccer match there isn't even an attempt to do the cool thing.  Make the cool things happen more, and the standing around kicking a ball in a circle happen less. Oh, and if a game ends 0-0 and neither team has more than five shots on goal, they both lose. 

Make soccer bearable to watch.

People keep clamoring for a shortening of regular seasons of hockey, basketball, and baseball. But the idea is that there are so many games that individual games are meaningless.

So if you chop basetball in half, you get 81 games, virtually the same length as hockey and basketball, a sport in which people complain that games are meaningless. 

To impute "meaning" into each game, as in, each one is so pivotal that a loss does serious damage to a team's postseason prospects, you need a season length in the neighborhood of at most 30 games. That might even be too much (hey, remember when Michigan lost at Northwestern?). But reduce a season to that length and you've done real violence to the nature of the sport, in my opinion. 

Baseball is meant to be played daily over long periods of time. There is a real joy in following a team over a season. Sometimes you just check the score, or it's on the radio, or you flip on the last three innings on tv. You can't reduce that to 30 "event" games without changing the nature of the season.

The same is basically true in hockey and basketball. The only real reason to shorten either of those seasons isn't the number of games, but the length of time the season takes, an argument I can accept for hockey which has little business being played in June.

I cannot watch the NBA anymore, first every team has like 5 alternate jerseys.  It takes me five minutes to figure out who is playing and where they are playing, because apparently home teams wear dark jerseys sometimes.  

The season and playoffs are too long.  Shrink the season or shrink the playoffs.  I am done watching basketball in the middle of June.

I would like to see the NBA have a wild card game for a playoff team or 2 to get in.  A one game winner take all, like MLB does.  Those would make for some high drama games to get excited about.

Football: Inflict huge penalties for dangerous hits. Don't make the rules narrower; make them wider. The entire mentality of tacklers must change to the point where the idea of leading with the head is so instintively horrifying that they will no longer come close to doing so. If that unfairly blesses offense, make some sort of adjustment to balance things out. But the safety issue is huge. 

Also, develop the technology to track the location of the football at all times for analyzing spots and touchdown calls. People who argue that you still can't tell when the ballcarrier is down, well, replays can discern that 80-90% of the time. Identify the frame in which the runner is judged down, and the technology can identify the exact position of the ball at that moment.

Basketball: Limit to 3 times out, but then allow teams two additional "ball advance" whistles that move the ball into the frontcourt in the last two minutes. 

I'd be interested to see an experiment with the idea that in these borderline, controversial block-charge calls that could go either way, the refs simply call it a draw and make no call at all. 

Hockey: Shrink goaltender equipment significantly. I'm in favor of banning the act of leaving feet to block shots, too. 

Baseball: Use the technology already available to more accurately call balls and strikes. I'm not yet ready to call for abolishing the home plate ump, but it is such a fundamental mechanic of the game that it's crucial to get it right. 

Also, continue to make that same information more available to the viewer. Seeing how pitchers and batters battle and work the zone is great.

Soccer: Instead of resolving crucial draw games with penalties, use set pieces. Say, a series of two opposite corner kicks and a dangerous-angle free kick from outside the box. A set play ends when the ball goes across any touchline or when the offensive team commits a foul. Each team gets an attempt in each round. A team that leads after a round is the winner, very much like college football's current arrangement.

College sports: Allow players to make NIL income.

Use a "multiple season" concept.  I figured this one out for a 32-team NHL:

I. October & November:  the 32 teams play a single round robin.  31 games in 2 months.

II. December & January:  the teams split into 4 regional divisions of 8 teams each, and play a triple round robin. 21 games in 2 months (with all-star break and break between 12/25 and 1/1).

III. mid-February to mid-April:  during the late January all-star break, there is a drawing and the teams are split (randomly!) into 2 divisions of 16, and play a double round robin.  

The top 3 of Phase I automatically make the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  The top 2 of each division in Phase II automatically make the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  The top 2 of each division in Phase III automatically make the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  If necessary, fill out the Stanley Cup Playoffs to 16 teams so that the best teams not already qualified get in.

Also, in early February, right after the all-star break, have a 32-team single-elimination tournament, just like the FA cup but more important.  The winner of the single-elimination tournament gets 5 home / 2 away advantage in all 4 rounds of the Stanley Cup.

Changes:

1. No helmets
2. No penalties
3. Pucks made of depleted uranium.  

Full contact figure skating. Kerrigan could finally get some payback on Harding.

C'mon - tell me it wouldn't sell.

College Football - expand the field to 8 teams. 5 auto-bids for conference champions, 3 at large (leave an opening for a worthy G5 team), and somehow work in home games for the top seeds. Imagine an SEC team coming up north of the Mason-Dixon line in late December/early January. I know this would mean cycling out one of the traditional bowl sites, but as long as the Rose Bowl was never cycled out, I think we could live with not having the Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, or Fiesta Bowl once every few years.

MLB - cut the amount of games. The whole season just feels like a slog to get to October, and that's really the only point of the season where I start caring about what happens. 

NASCAR - stop calling it a sport at all. It's not a sport. Never has been, never will be. 

First and foremost...stop letting batters step out of the freaking box after EVERY damn pitch.  And don't give them time out to do it unless there's a really good reason.  If they step out of the box without time being called, it's an automatic called strike. You wouldn't need pitch clocks if you did that.  That's one of the main things that drove me away from baseball...the games just dragged on interminably because of the idiotic delay on every pitch.  And what was even more infuriating is that there were explicit guidelines about it in the rulebook (and maybe still are) and they were NEVER enforced.  Unlike a lot of the other changes being proposed, that would not change the fundamental nature of the game.

Soccer is most in need of fixing- starting with the flopping and the overtime format, especially the 'Golden Goal' (!!!)