I have a theory that the more complicated the sport, the more popular it is at Ohio University. I developed this theory while watching a volleyball game, which turned out to be a lot more elaborate than I expected. I was struggling to keep track of all the points, which were tallying up quickly, when suddenly the scoreboard reset and instead of 25 points, we had only one. That’s when I learned what a set was.
The next thing I wanted to know was how many sets were in a game, but that question had a surprisingly ambiguous answer: four. Or five. Or three. The length of the game depends on how well the teams are doing, which is a weird idea but makes sense if you understand how volleyball works. I didn’t initially understand how volleyball worked, but I gradually figured it out and I ended up having a good time. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of people having a good time with me in The Convo. The crowd was moderately large, but nothing near the size of the crowds that show up for, say, a football game. But why?
Volleyball is an exciting, fast-paced sport; the team is good, the announcer is
funny, there’s an inflatable Bobcat head — what’s not to love? This is where my theory comes in. It seems that the more involved a sport’s rules are, the more people turn out to watch.
The rules of soccer, for example, are fairly simple. Two teams kick a ball back and forth until the clock runs out. Whichever team has the most points after 90 minutes wins. The result of this straightforward concept, however, is that soccer is openly mocked for being boring.
Volleyball might occupy the next step up on the complexity ladder. It’s got a basic premise — two teams bonking a ball over a net — but there’s more to it than that. People rotate at seemingly random intervals, sometimes a team will get a point just because the other team did something wrong, and there’s one player who wears a different color than the rest of the team, for some reason.
Accordingly, volleyball crowds are biggerthan soccer crowds, but they still can’t quite fill out the stands. Then we get to football, which has approximately 17,000 rules and twice as many penalties, it requires people to consult charts and graphs to explain how the plays work, and it practically has its own foreign language, yet it’s the most popular sport in the nation and everyone thinks you’re crazy if you don’t understand it. The fans show up in droves to analyze the action and pick apart the details. I don’t understand the pattern. One would think the fan base would get thinner as the rulebook got thicker, but that doesn’t
seem to be the case.
I’m not in any sort of position to be doling out advice in this subject area, but that’s why I’m writing this column in the first place, so I’m going to give it a shot. If anyone out there is looking to jazz up an underappreciated sport and bring its appeal to the masses, try out these rules:
• One player on the team gets to be the special bonus player, and every time he
scores it’s worth three times as many points as a regular player. The catch? He’s blindfolded.
• Instead of a team earning points when it scores, each team loses points when the other team scores. If Team A scores 48 points and Team B scores 20 points, Team A would have -20 and Team B would have -48. The team with the lowest score loses.
• Every time a player breaks a rule, the game starts over. The next time you’re making up a game in your backyard, try some of these rule adjustments. Use as many as possible and alter them spontaneously. As far as I can tell, everyone
would love it.
Haylee Pearl is a sophomore studying
journalism, a novice sports viewer and a
copy editor for The Post. Is the complexity
of the sport related to its popularity? Tell
her your theory at hp208310@ohiou.edu.
