I propose that whichever team gets to 100 points first is the winner. (In American football, make it 25; in soccer, make it 3). Thus, the object is to continually score points, rather than just to end up ahead at the end of a time period. This is preferable because in standard scoring, a team which is ahead often tries to "stall" or "freeze the ball", in an attempt to run out the clock. This is exceptionally boring to watch.

Under Race To 100, teams will have to keep scoring until they win the game.

So the game will stay interesting from beginning to end.

An additional advantage is that there will be no "overtime". (Overtime is handled unsatisfactorily in soccer, where the winner may be decided not by play but by penalty kicks.) In R2100 scoring, the game ends when it ends, period.

There can still be breaks in the game every 15 minutes (i.e. "quarters") but the game continues for an unpredetermined amount of time until one team has reached the target of 100 points. So there may be more or fewer than four periods in the game.
-- phundug, Nov 10 2003

Anything to end interminably long professional sporting events more quickly.

Could be a problem in that two especially good defensive teams could play for a very long, boring time.

Rapid fire bowling might be challenging.

On the up side, I could probably win if this scheme applied to golf.
-- half, Nov 10 2003


Sorry, no, at least in the case of soccer. You can't mess with the beautiful game!
-- Mistress Bling, Nov 10 2003


I thought that this was how American Sports worked anyway. Fishbone!
-- DrBob, Nov 11 2003


I've fishboned every soccer suggestion on the half bakery so far, not from principle, but simply because none of them help. Suggesting radical rule changes to a game rather suggests that something is radically wrong with it. Well phundug, its not. Soccer is a great game, no need to tamper with it.

[To add to my propensity to fish this idea, it's clear that the race to 100 wouldn't work for all sports. Cricket for example, would be dull and unworkable if it stopped at 100. Some, of course, believe cricket to be dull already ...]
-- jonthegeologist, Nov 11 2003



random, halfbakery