To cheat or not to cheat

             

One thing everyone is taught as a child is not to cheat.  Winners never cheat, and cheaters never win.  There is also an old saying: “If you ain’t cheatin’, then you ain’t tryin’.”  I wonder if that statement is engraved on Bill Belichick’s office wall.

Someone should tell the Oakland Raiders that cheaters never win, because they cheated 23 times last Sunday and won. This is nothing new; in the 1992 Simpson’s episode Lisa the Greek, she explains that she’s picking the Raiders to win because they cheat, and sure enough the Raiders win on what the announcer describes as a “very suspicious play.” Cheating is in the Raiders DNA.

Of the three major American sports (sorry soccer, you aren’t there yet), only baseball has a strict “no cheating” policy.  If you are caught cheating in the smallest detail, what you gained is taken away.  Anyone who has seen George Brett's reaction to having a home run disqualified because his bat was too dirty knows that enforcing the rules does not always make sense (the ruling was sensibly overturned and they replayed the rest of the game with the home run allowed).

This sense of morality gets warped a lot when talking about baseball.  Just as there is no rule against stealing bases, there is also no rule against stealing signs.  You don’t want the runner on second tipping off the batter?  Develop a more sophisticated signaling system.  Yet announcers will describe suspected peekers with barely disguised distain in their voices.  It’s not exactly cheating, but this also colors the demand for instant replay and the micro-examination of every close call; we can’t allow the runner a base if he was out by the tiniest fraction of an inch, because that’s the rule.

Basketball and football are different.  There are violations, there are penalties, and sometimes the gain from committing the violation is worth the penalty.  It is illegal to foul an opponent in basketball, but if the opposing player has a free throw shooting percentage under 50%, go ahead and hack him.  In the NFL holding is illegal, but if holding is the only way to prevent your quarterback from being blindsided, hold away.  Baseball attempts to eradicate the violation; football and basketball impose a penalty that may, or may not, discourage such behavior.

I wrote not long ago about how football penalties should be completely re-examined.  Yardage penalties established in the days of “three yards and a cloud of dust” offenses may not be appropriate to today’s high-octane pass-oriented offenses.  Offenses pass so much that maybe pass interference should be 15 yards instead of putting the ball at the spot of the foul, assuming the pass would have been caught but for the interference.  Maybe holding is so ubiquitous it should be a five yard penalty instead of ten; or maybe it is so ubiquitous the penalty should be twenty yards.

Where this has become critical is the protection of a quarterback in the NFL.  The health of a team’s quarterback is the number one determinant of whether that team’s season is a success, or if they will have a high draft pick. With new concussion protocols now in place, any blow to the head might take a QB out of the game.  Alex Smith of the Chiefs was knocked out of the game because of a concussion that was sustained when the defender pushed his head into the turf.  Cam Newton complained about a shot taken at his knees that looked like it should have been flagged; the NFL’s response created some new questions.

The NFL and NBA must ask some tough questions, like are penalties supposed to eliminate cheating or merely discourage it? Should the penalty for fouling an opponent be increased, or should poor free throw shooters simply practice more until they are better?  How can you discourage cheating when the gain from injuring an opposing player is clearly greater than the loss of a few yards, or the ejection of a player from one game?

Baseball essentially has a zero-tolerance policy on cheating.  How close do football and basketball want to come to emulate it?