Changing sports for "excitement" and TV friendliness suckens them bad.

[mrflibble]

Personally I think T20 cricket is an improvement over even ODI, cause you can actually sit down and watch a whole game. The field limit rules to increase scoring I don't care much about but the shortened format is quite nice.

Different tastes. I can't stand 20/20. One of the worst things to happen to cricket in my opinion.

[Dragar]

Yeah 20/20 just aint cricket

[Corrie]

Rally races stagger the start for each person so it's more like a time trial and less like a race. Could the traithalon do that, or are there too many athletes and it would end up taking all day?

[Bluefan75]

It is quite interesting to hear the justifications for some of these things. Someone defended volleyball's new scoring rules as saying "you can't slack off, every point counts." Well, a tick may go up on the board, but under the old system, the other team couldn't score if you had the serve. How did points not count then? There wasn't a response to that question.

The serve area was also increased for the whole width of the court from just one third of it. That and the ability to hit the net with the serve was designed to encourage the spike serve, which was deemed "more exciting" for television.

The best one though was someone talking about bikinis in beach volleyball being a good thing for the sport. Now, I'm not saying bikinis aren't a good thing, but I think it's beyond a stretch to say that the people who are watching beach volleyball because the girls are in bikinis will have any interest in watching any kind of volleyball where they aren't wearing bikinis.

There was/is actually quite a splinter between the ITU and the WTC(World triathlon corp) that runs the ironman branded races over the drafting. Both organizations have many, many faults, but as stated the drafting was the only way to get into the Olympics, because they didn't want something that didn't come down to the wire. You can't "X-Games" up the Olympics with an event that someone can just come in way ahead of competitors.

[Patrick]

I much prefer the old beach scoring as well.

One thing I really don't like in the continuous sports (soccer, basketball, volleyball, etc) is when they insert "technical" timeouts, which just means "television" timeout. Part of these sports is endurance! When you play a beach tournament, and I suspect this is tournament 101, you often hit at the guy who has the worst endurance so that he'll be dead by the end of the match and eventually by the end of the day. Throwing a 3-5 minute break every 15 minutes completely changes the game, and given the relationship between serve receives and having to explode to hit, it can erase a glaring deficit in conditioning. Do not like.

EDIT - Also, I don't like the net on serve rule as a player. Maybe fine on a very good court, but if the net is the least bit saggy it just ruins the game.

[Age_of_Aquarius]

"I was not the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd and you will win your freedom."

[cyhulhupun]

I see the same thing in rugby. 7's is becoming more popular, partly because it's more TV friendly. It has also led to many rule changes in the 15's game that are lessening the set pieces and opening up the flow of the game. It's becoming more like league.

[veryhrm]

An example of making things worse for TV: Gymnastics scoring (and i think diving ). The newish system where they multiply execution * difficulty makes a heck of a lot more sense (to me, as a total outsider to the sport) than the old system where scores were just on an arbitrary scale from 0 to 10.

However, it is much more confusing to watch since i never know what the scores mean until some tells me. So this is an example where they went the other way and made the sport itself better for competitors and logic even if it is harder for the uninitiated.