The total weight limit for football teams
David Friedman suggests that, instead of limiting a football team to 11 men, you allow the team as many men on the field as they’d like, with the constraint that their total weight be below some 2400 pounds. It’s an interesting idea.
Commenters suggest the related idea of limiting the total height of a basketball team to 30 feet. Then we’d find out right away how tall these players really are.
I’m not saying these ideas are perfect, but they’re interesting.
Comments
Do you need restrictions on the total team or just for who is on the field/court at once? Seems hard to do the latter as substitutions would need to be exact. Or maybe people over a certain height can only play in the 2nd and 3rd quarters, leaving the opening and closing to people closer to the median. :-)
Posted by: Doug Hess | May 31, 2009 03:00 PM
Best players in either sport are rarely at the high end of either statistic.
Skills players in football account for a minimum of weight, the only affect this would have is on o-line.
Of the top-ten NBA scorers of all time, only two are 7’+ (Abdul-Jabbar and Chamberlain)
Posted by: Drew Conway | May 31, 2009 11:13 PM