Safeties should be worth more than touchdowns

[Happy Panther]

2 minutes ago, MHS831 said:

I don't understand why we call it football, now that I think about it--you just say it and don't realize how dumb the name really is.  Like the Buffalo Bills.  That is stupid if you give it some thought. That would be as dumb as the Colts changing their name to the Indiana Joneses.

Deep thoughts, by MHS.

We call it football because it was initially more like soccer than it is today.

[MHS831]

2 minutes ago, Happy Panther said:

We call it football because it was initially more like soccer than it is today.

But we don't call softball "baseball," and it is very much like baseball.  We don't call volleyball  tennis, etc.  We don't call curling driveway scraping....

It is not like they were out of words. 

I am just being extremely hilarious today.  Don't mind me.

[jfra78]

4 minutes ago, Happy Panther said:

We call it football because it was initially more like soccer than it is today.

I thought in the early days they ran and there was no forward pass

[JARROD]

Well as it is worth 2 plus the team keeps possession and has a shortened kickoff.  Also it’s worth up to 10 points if you  score again.

i do think kicking should be worth more And less for distance. 2 points for under 30 yards, 3 points to 50 and 4 points for more. 5 points for 60 yards

[Happy Panther]

2 hours ago, jfra78 said:

I thought in the early days they ran and there was no forward pass

Right and to score you had to kick the ball into a goal or between markers. Had soccer rules too.

[beo]

6 hours ago, jfra78 said:

I thought in the early days they ran and there was no forward pass

what you're talking about is the first NFL/pro football games in the late 1910s and early 1920s (atleast i think), the first american football game was played between princeton and rutgers in 1869. was very, very similar to soccer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1869_New_Jersey_vs._Rutgers_football_game

 

(a somewhat depressing sidenote, the only national championship rutgers football claims is the 1869 championship, a "season" in which only two games were played, both between princeton and rutgers. to make this even more depressing, princeton claims 28, including 1869, as that title was retroactively given to both teamas as co-champions)

[Snake]

9 hours ago, woahfraze said:

 

How would you determine which team kicked their field goal first?  The team going second would have the advantage of choosing a longer kick if the other team made their's, or a shorter one if the other team missed.

A coin toss?

Visiting team would go second. Naturally the home team would have an advantage because it would be their home field. 

[Peon Awesome]

18 hours ago, Snake said:

Another cool concept would be instead of a coin flip each team would kick a unblocked FG. Whoever gets the longest distance gets ball or can take the ball in the second half. Would make kickers much more important. 

Interesting. I would suggest having both kickers kick at the same time as to avoid the huge advantage of going 2nd that people have brought up, as well as speed things up. It would be lame for the first person to miss a 60 yard fg and then the 2nd person gets to knock in a 20 yarder. I would also suggest that if both players miss, the team whose kicker attempted the longer kick gets the ball, incentivizing the kicker to try a longer kick.

 

18 hours ago, jfra78 said:

As far as FG points go, I feel we should just get rid of them all together.  Maybe once you cross the 50 you have to use all 4 downs.

I would tweak this to say once you enter the redzone, you're not allowed to kick a field goal. That way, there are no chip shot field goals. It would keep the kicker valuable because you need someone who can reliably knock down 40+ yarders, distances that still have some intrigue due to their not automatic nature and the fact the opposing team gets great field position if you miss. But it also gets rid of the annoying anticlimactic ending of games where teams are down 1 or 2, march down to the 5 and kneel it 3 times before knocking in a 20 yarder. It adds another strategic element too. Do you trust your kicker to knock down a high pressure 39 yarder to win the game, or do you put the game in the hands of your offense and assume with a potential two sets of 4 downs they can score a td from inside the 20? How exciting would that be?

I'm not necessarily advocating for either change but think they are actually interesting ideas I wouldn't be upset by.

[Gesualdo]

No one actually asked, but just to set it down for the record:

Etymologists increasingly agree the sport is called "football" because it is played on foot. (There's still some dispute, but when you look at the record, which goes back 800 years, it's pretty apparent.) This seems inane to the modern ear, but it was a useful distinction many centuries ago, when most "sport" (think hunting) was done on horseback. The game existed for hundreds of years without rules - or rather, with loose rules that differed from town to town. It didn't resemble any of the versions we see today. Hell, it didn't resemble itself: It was a completely different game in any given local iteration.

At the time the English started settling around the world and spreading this lawless game, none of the current codes (versions) had been codified, and the game continued to evolve in each place it arrived. Eventually, most of the major Anglo countries evolved and codified their own versions of the game. The US and Canada codified American football and Canadian football. The Australians codified Australian football - although the origins of that sport are more complex and remain the subject of debate among sport historians. The English developed two separate codes - association football (soccer) and rugby football - and eventually three, with the rugby schism of the 1890s that resulted in a new code (to be called rugby league) splitting off from the established code (now called rugby union).

[I'm leaving out Gaelic football because the picture is a bit more complicated: Basically, a long tradition of indigenous Irish "football" sport that nearly died off...then was supplanted by an imported codified game...which was then extensively re-indigenized and re-codified.]

Naturally, in each case, people kept calling their sport "football" because that's what they had been calling it since before it was even formalized as a sport. (The exception was the upper-class dimwits who gave us rugby, who conceded the "football" name pretty early since they shared a country with another, more popular code.) 

Important to note: While all of the codes are "genetically" related, in that they descend from the same proto-sport, none is a parent to any other, aside from the rugby schism. We're talking about brothers, not fathers and sons. American and Canadian football were heavily influenced by collegiate rugby in their own pre-codification rules, but again, it's just a matter of influence. If a little brother starts dressing like his big brother, his brother still isn't his dad.

[Carl Spackler]

Getting rid of kicking would leave football with no contact between foot and ball

[jfra78]

8 minutes ago, Carl Spackler said:

Getting rid of kicking would leave football with no contact between foot and ball

They can keep that weird play where the QB kicks it, just for shits and giggles

[Asurfaholic]

I would be pleased if they changed the safety to be scored as a defensive touchdown. It would bring a much needed fire back to defensive urgency when a special teams can pin the opponent deep. To capitalize and score a safety would actually be game changing. 
 

Some of the suggestions that would change where the kickoff occurs wouldn’t likely get much traction in this player safety age- bringing back deeper kickoff locations would guarantee that returns are fielded and the return team would likely be charging harder as they are that much closer to their own goal line, and the kicking team equally as violent. All adds up to moving backwards from the safety standpoint. 
 

Looking at everything through the (lame, but necessary) player safety standpoint, changing the safety to be worth more points probably doesn’t create more violent collisions between players so it’s viable from that aspect.