Suggestion from a guy that doesn't like football to make it more interesting. . .

[CPA]

And those days will be over soon, when your wife (and 98.3425% of mothers) won't let your son play football due to more knowledge about CTE and its risks. Enjoy it while you can, soon it'll be flag football. Refer back to this post in 10 years and tell me I wasn't right.

I can tell you here in Texas moms are a driving force in getting their kids into football. Some of our most craziest fans are the moms. I don't see it going away anytime soon.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Rugby is the most interesting non-American sport, bar none, and for someone that thinks football is too slow, is the perfect alternative.

The rules are a little simpler as well, though I'm not entirely sure exactly why sometimes they scrum and sometimes they don't.

I won't get too into detail, since this is an American Football thread, but to respond to your last comment, there are occasions when the referee awards one of the teams an option to scrum (among other options) as a penalty to the other team. The scrum option is not always selected. This inconsistency in the results from certain penalties may be the cause of some confusion.

In the vast majority of cases, however, scrums are the consequence of one team causing the ball to go forward from a player's hands.

 

[Brigandier]

In the vast majority of cases, however, scrums are the consequence of one team causing the ball to go forward from a player's hands.

How would that happen? Are you talking about during tackles?

 

[Fern]

OP hasn't thought this out too well.

Football, unlike soccer, doesn't have the ball in play continuously. You'd have to create all sorts of new rules to prevent a team in the lead from eating up the clock by being purposefully slow to bring in the offense/defense/punting/kickoff/field goal squads.

In soccer, if a teams tries to slow things down, the other team can just go after them and try to steal the ball, not so in football.

Anyone with even a minimum understanding of football who thinks about it for more than 2 seconds can see why the clock has to be stopped for certain things (e.g., change of possession). Just letting the clock run would result in much less football actually being played in many games and would create all kinds of problems that require even more rules. It's just a bad idea.

Fern

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

In the vast majority of cases, however, scrums are the consequence of one team causing the ball to go forward from a player's hands.

How would that happen? Are you talking about during tackles?

I'm talking about any time. Usually when it happens, it's because a player has fumbled a pass to him and knocks the ball forward off of his hands. That's a "knock on," and the consequence is a scrum where the opposing team will get the put-in.

Other times, a player simply passes the ball cleanly to his teammate, but his teammate is not behind him, so the pass goes forward instead of backward. This is no different in consequence from a "knock on."

Surely, though, there are plenty of occasions where ball carriers lose the ball from their hands and cause it to go forward when they are being tackled. Virtually every occasion where a ball touches a player's hand and then goes forward into play results in a scrum. The only exception that I can think of is when the ball hits a player's hands when he's charging to block a kick.

EDIT: also, if a player can catch the ball before it hits the ground after incidentally knocking the ball forward, there is no penalty. Intentional "forward passes to one's self" are penalized, however.