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Sunday 31 May 2009
Fairness in Sports: A Modest Proposal

To increase agricultural output on a fixed amount of land, you increase labor and fertilizer. If a nuclear limitation treaty limits the number of missiles, a nation that wants to maintain its arsenal does it by increasing the size of warheads, the number of warheads per missile, or both.

Consider the same principle in the context of sports. A football team faces an artificial constraint on the resources used to produce victory—it is only allowed eleven men on the field at a time. It responds, naturally enough, by making them big men. Very big.

The obvious solution to the manifest unfairness of this result—blatant bigism—is a small change in the rules. Instead of limiting the number of players on the field, limit their total weight. A team is allowed to have up to 2400 pounds of players on the field at one time. That can be a ten man team averaging 240 lbs, a fifteen man team averaging 160 lbs, or any other mix that produces the same total. For basketball, perhaps the constraint should be on total height instead of total weight.

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