Score touchdowns! But not too many, because feelings could get hurt...

This 11-year-old running back in an Arkansas youth football league has become so dominant that the league is instituting a rule that the kid can't score more than three touchdowns per game:

http://rivals.yahoo.com/highschool/blog/prep_rally/post/Youth-league-institutes-TD-limit-to-hold-back-11?urn=highschool-wp6562

 

I think they should let the defense use 15 players instead.

 

Someone get the:

 

While it singles out an individual, this seems no different in principle than any other mercy rule appropriate for that age group.

 

THE LEAGUE IS COSTING THIS KID A SCHOLARSHIP!!!!!!

 

It isn't delicate psyches. It is trying to serve the needs of the entire league of 100 or however many kids are playing. You aren't teaching the game to anybody if it is 35-0 in the second quarter and only one kid has touched the ball for the offense.

Football doesn't have comp and rec divisions, and you can't really move this kid up because there are safety concerns if he is playing against guys who are much bigger. Seems like a one-year fix to a special case that has only happened one time previously, and that one time didn't hold Madre Hill back from becoming a Division I star.

 

I hope every time he is not allowed to score a TD he runs to the 1-yard line and kneels down. Then someone else can score.

 

The story points out that the rule (which was modeled on a prior dominant player) only applies while the kid is in 6th grade. Once he's in 7th grade, he'll play unrestrained.

As to the psyches of the other players (and I'd suggest it's the psyches of the parents that are 'delicate'), how seriously are you prepared to insist we take 6th grade football?

 

I guess this plan is better than telling your kids to stomp on his knee and punch him in the nuts when he's down.

 

Seems from the story that the worry was the level of participation for the other kids, not the final score.

I agree to an extent that trying to manage kids this way is futile, but having created organized leagues like these we're stuck with it.

If I ran the world, I'd walk every 6th grader out to a big mowed field every day after school, toss down four or five duffels filled with bats and balls of every kind and tell them they've got two hours to do whatever they want.

 

Agree entirely. And if this kid is so good, he's probably bored out of his skull

They move kids up in hockey here all the time so this kid would be playing with 13 year olds in an elite, full contact league. But nobody would probably be able to catch him, let alone hit him.

 

He was wearing an Adrian Peterson jersey, right? Just treat him like the real AP and don't give him the ball in the second half. Problem solved.