Proposed High School Football Rule Changes - No Player Left Behind

NEW FOOTBALL RULES

These changes are being proposed to make football programs work equally and more proficiently.

1. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are champions, and coaches will be held responsible.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL.

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own. Coaches must work with students who aren’t interested in football.

4. Games will be played year around but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th and 11th games.

5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals. If no team gets ahead, then no team will be left behind.

Reprinted *without* permission from SECO newsletter
Terry Shiverdecker Executive director

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One can only imagine how wonderful Ohio's High School Football program will be once these changes take effect. For those of you unfamiliar with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, these proposed changes to OHSAA football rules are but a natural extension.

Once these changes are in place, minor details like single parent households where the one parent is working 60 hours a week to pay the bills and therefore can't help with homework or even suggest that school is a good idea, will simply disappear. In the meantime, these rule changes will eliminate the need for parental involvement anyway. These changes will make all students accept their responsibility on their own, motivating them all to become fully functioning football players simply because they will know that federal government is looking out for them by requiring them all to perform at the same level regardless of their actual ability, desire, support from home, or legal problems.

Likewise, the reliance on community involvement will be eliminated. With these rules in place, school levies will become a thing of the past. Members of communities who benefitted from well funded public schools in the past will be able to scrub from their conscience the fact that their public education was paid for with tax money, that it was good enough for them, and that it educated them enough in the political process to be able to vote no for a new levy. Modern students be damned what with all their wasteful ways, reliance on the public largesse, and greedy desire to get a diploma. NCLB will answer that call by adding more requirements to the already cash-strapped system thus enabling them to spend their way out of a deficit. After all, local debt, like national debt isn't really debt - it's just imaginary money we're borrowing from ourselves. School boards can simply follow the federal lead and quit worrying about balanced budgets and start focusing on football for everyone. With the focus on football, no one will notice 9 digit deficits in the local school board budgets.

These rules should solve the voucher issue as well. No more crying about public funds being funnelled off to private schools who don't have to follow the rules... who are able to recruit football players, and expel non-performers. Under this plan, everyone will be a football player. Private schools will no longer have the advantage of choosing their students from households where education is a high priority, where both parents attended college, where personal responsibility is instilled, and where a parent is available to help with homework and moral responsibility. Under the new rules, students won't need parents to instill values. The public schools will either do that through their NCLB Football Program or they'll be taken over by the state. Problem solved.

The need for Head Start programs or other such fluff will be eliminated immediately. When students' football prowess is measured at the 4th, 8th, and 11th games, they will be too focused on the tests to worry about whether or not they've had breakfast or adequate healthcare or been abused or any of that crap. Football will rule, and we'll measure it, and we'll get rid of coaches who can't convince their players that nutrition or mental health or a safe home environment or parents as role models aren't as important as football. Weed out the deadwood and play ball. Then test it so we know it works.

Sure, the tests and their administration will cost money, but we can make that up in a number of ways. First of all, we can eliminate all school counselors and administrators who aren't already coaches in their spare time. They don't need time with their familes. They need to keep the gyms and the weight rooms open at all hours. We won't need to deal with individual issues or seek scholarships or offer career advice or discipline students since every student will get a football scholarship and won't have to learn how to behave. If those budget cuts fall short, and we can't spend our way out of debt, the NFL will pitch in. Football programs will be so successful that NFL teams will want to pour money into them as their minor leagues. In addition, we can cut taxes, thereby sparking the local economies, thus actually generating more revenue. No matter how you look at it, this is a win-win, trust me.

But the best part is, we can begin systematically eliminating all those overpaid, egotistical teachers who don't carry their own weight and who believe their subject matter is even remotely important. Let's face it: Those who can do and those who can't teach. Those teachers and administrators have been given a free ride for far too long. What with all their "but what about the curriculum" and all that "I love my job." They've been sucking up the big bucks, having their egos massaged by rooms full of adolescent admirers for far too long. They've let the praise, constant adoration and gratitude of students and their parents, the public respect and inflated salaries, go to their heads. It's time for a wake-up call. They either turn those students, every one of them, into football studs, or they find a job at McDonald's. Where else will they find a use for those masters degrees?

Speaking of that, there's another funding source waiting to be tapped. How many school districts pay for all those state-mandated masters programs? That's ridiculous. Who ever heard of an employer requiring further education and then actually paying for that additional requirement! First off, we can cut the masters programs entirely. Then we can eliminate all those generous tuition reimbursement programs that help the already overpaid teachers pay for another diploma to hang on their "I-love-me" walls. Those teachers will eventually leave public schools anyway as soon as they realize the public good is better served if they leave the cushy, glamorous world of education and do something more altruistic like sell pharmaceuticals or consult corporations, or become actuaries or brokers or doctors or lawyers or GM employees or some other low-paying position for which they're probably way underqualified and certainly undereducated. While it's hard to leave the bell-scheduled-28-minute-lunch-perform-8-different-sales-pitches-to-120-hostile-clients-per-day-boogers-on-your-desk ritual, eventually a higher need does call many of them away. So we'll have that exodus working for us as well.

In the end, the state of Ohio will become a football powerplant generating batch after batch of high-performing players who will flood the NFL and go on to solve every single problem facing our nation, like stopping the Colts, or bringing the Texans up to speed, or putting all the elements of one Browns team together in the same season. Parents, health, abilities and desires will be eliminated from the equation - they're signs of selfishness anyway. They serve no purpose on a team. Ability won't matter as long as they want it bad enough and the coaches will make them want it bad enough once those pesky teachers and administrators with their petty curricular concerns are out of the way. Life skills, personal independence and responsibility will no longer weigh anyone down. In the rare event that a player falters or loses the desire, that player can carry water bottles during the game and run suicides in practice until the motivation returns. I really don't see how we can lose nor why we waited so long to implement such a basic idea.

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Terry Shiverdecker is a former science teacher where I work. She now works for the Science Education Council for Ohio (SECO). The only change I made to the "New Football Rules" from their newsletter is to change the "Reprinted with permission..." to "Reprinted without..." I hope I don't get sued for that!

At this point, I feel it appropriate to end with a quote from a highly regarded cultural source. In the immortal words of Ox, from his informative, thoughtful, cleverly written campaign speech for student council president in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure:

"SAN DIMAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL RULES!"

Luth,

Out.