not to, and apparently fumbled the ball as he tried to tuck it away. Oakland recovered the ball, but after consulting instant replay and conferring with other officials, the referee gave the ball back to the Patriots.48 The call not only decided the game but also sparked controversy, as it depended not on the video evidence but on what it meant to throw or fumble a football. The rule survived for fourteen years. In 2013, the NFL voted to get rid of the tuck rule, eliminating uncertainty in referee judgments not via technology but via procedure.49
Rules holes show us that even in the most highly regulated situations, unforeseen contingencies arise. If rules cannot be created to cover every possible occurrence in a sporting context, then there is no hope for comprehensive rule making in broader society. Science, technology, and changing values all contribute to a perceived need for rules to change. How we deal with rules holes is a hallmark of good governance in sport, because rule making is always going to be imperfect, always subject to revision, and always in need of close attention.
We now have a vocabulary that can help us understand what’s at stake in the war against cheating and how that war is being fought. To summarize, here are the key terms:
Constitutive rules: Rules about rules
Regulatory rules: Rules that govern game play
Norms: Broadly held societal expectations for behavior
Cheating: The violation of constitutive rules
Ordinary play: A competition in practice
Penalty: A sanction imposed for the violation of regulatory rules
Cynical play: A violation of both regulatory rules and norms
Gamesmanship: A violation of norms but not of regulatory rules
Rules hole: A contingency not covered by existing rules
The next part of this book takes a close look at five battlegrounds in that war: amateurism in college sports, doping, match fixing, technology in sport, and sex testing. On each battleground, constitutive rules are being violated—or, to put it bluntly, people are accused of cheating. And their cheating doesn’t just affect the outcome of a particular game or match; it could also strike at the very existence of sport as we know it. These battlegrounds are where going over the edge can threaten the possibility of sport itself.
a Even this norm may be changing. Today, it seems that players often are skeptical of their peers, and sometimes continue play, rather than kicking the ball out of bounds, when they are in a good offensive position or the down player is away from the action.
b As the favorite, Arsenal may have found it easy to act so magnanimously. Arsenal won the replay as well. See “Arsenal 2-1 Sheffield United (1998–99) FA Cup—Result Void,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=71&v=whO5GAFBp30.
c Of course, such calls often require a degree of judgment, so there is inevitably a gray area between a penalty and a blown call.
d See Ronaldinho’s trickery here: Chilean Football League, “Controversial Goal Because of Ronaldinho the Liberators,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7daGFe8Q3kc.
e For a case of a restart in a soccer match between Liverpool and Sunderland where the proper application of a norm was contested because of the ambiguity of its status as a norm rather than a formal rule: Steve Busfield, see “Should Liverpool’s Goal against Sunderland Have Stood?” Guardian, September 27, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/sep/27/liverpool-sunderland-stuart-attwell.
f Chapter 7 discusses human versus nonhuman baseball umpires.
g It was misconduct as defined under the regulations of the International Rugby Boards (IRB), as explained here: http://www.epcrugby.com/images/content/Tom_Williams_and_Harlequins_Independent_Disciplinary_Committee_Decision.PDF. The most recent version of the regulations governing rugby can be found at http://www.englandrugby.com/governance/regulations/#.
h Watch a video showing a bit of this farce here: Barbados vs. Grenada (Shell Caribbean Cup, 1994), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThpYsN-4p7w.
i You can see the rule book at http://www.fig-gymnastics.com/site/rules/main.
j This was not the first instance of a tie in Olympics track and field qualification; it happened in 1984; see Julie Cart, “Play It Again: Turner, Fitzgerald-Brown, Page and Hightower to Have Rematch Saturday,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1985, http://articles.latimes.com/1985-06-07/sports/sp-16199_1_stephanie-hightower.
Amateurs: Who Is Being Cheated?
“Right now the NCAA is like a dictatorship. No one represents us in negotiations. The only way things are going to change is if players have a union.”1 With these words in early 2014, Northwestern University’s Cain Kolter, the starting quarterback on its football team, announced that he was leading an effort to unionize the school’s football players. Football players at Northwestern, and indeed college athletes generally, don’t have the right to unionize because under US law they are not considered employees. Instead, they are considered students who pursue athletics as an extracurricular activity. In recent years, the notion of the college athlete participating in sports as a side activity to university education has come under intense pressure.
Big-time college sports in the United States are dependent on amateurism as the basis for a vast suite of rules and regulations. “Big-time” typically refers to men’s football and basketball programs—multibillion-dollar enterprises with far more in common with professional leagues than with other intercollegiate sports.
I argue in this chapter that big-time college sports are unsustainable in their current form and that changes in how college sports are run are inevitable. What those changes might be and how they might affect universities and sports is highly uncertain, but I do have some ideas about how college athletics might adapt to the realities of the twenty-first century while preserving much of what makes college athletics so beloved. It is possible to replace an outdated reliance on a romantic myth of amateurism with a pragmatic approach to professionalism that preserves the essence of college sports. But first, before looking forward, let’s take a look back at how college sport found itself at the current fork in the road.
When Cain Kolter and his fellow teammates sought to unionize, the NCAA responded with strong opposition: “This union-backed attempt to turn student-athletes into employees undermines the purpose of college: an education. Student-athletes are not employees, and their participation in college sports