Football team cancels game due to rule changes

South Shore Voke opts not to play its football against West Bridgewater Friday – Boston Herald

This year, Massachusetts adopted the NFHS football rules (as well as NFHS rules in baseball and volleyball) after decades of using modified NCAA rules.

In past years, the state association has left it up to each league to determine things like the length of quarters. Most leagues played 11-minute quarters. In some of the leagues with smaller schools, they played 10. The state finals were 10 because they had to fit eight games into two days at Gillette Stadium. Previously, each team also had five timeouts (3 full, 2 30-second) per half.

Now, with the NFHS rules, the association mandates 12-minute quarters. The state tried to get a waiver that would have allowed for shorter games, but the NFHS declined.

This school, citing safety concerns canceled its most recent game. It's a small school, but I'm sure there are plenty of other small schools in the other 48 states that use NFHS rules that survive 12-minute quarters just fine.

 

How does a paper write that without including the roster size for the team?

 

West Bridgewater is pretty good nowadays, I think, so I wonder how much of that was “we don’t want our asses kicked.”

 

Yeah, this gets back to the discussion of 11-man vs. 8-man football which we've gone around a few times before. If you have 22 or fewer players on the team, thus forcing almost every player to play both ways, it's probably a relevant factor.

Going back to those debates, and having covered quite a few of these 12-15 player "Ironman" teams, I've always felt the NFHS should put in a nationwide rule that you must have 25 players in uniform and available to play for 11-man football.

Otherwise, you're constantly put in situations where players get ankles dinged up, knees twisted, knocked half woozy, and, knowing the coach has nobody to put in to replace them, trying to just "suck it up."

When you, as a writer, are invariably sent out to do a feature story on the gritty gutty little competitors still playing despite only 12-15 or however many players, the stories almost always prominently feature stories about how this player or that player "toughed it out" despite twisted ankles, etc etc.

 

Any team with fewer than 25 who complain they can't compete can feel free to try out for field hockey. We had 19 to start out my senior year on my football team, had a few get hurt and finished the year.

If you have 25 and are eligible to play 8-man or even 6-man (and a few schools in those states do), then good on you.