One of the things prior probability likes about soccer is the simplicity of its rules–there are just 17 simple rules in soccer (*)–and especially the fact that there are no “time-outs” and thus no manipulation of the game clock in the beautiful game. The final seconds of a basketball or football game, by contrast, suck to watch because of the way players and coaches try to extend the game artificially by manipulating the game clock in various ways. So why don’t basketball and football just get rid of time-outs and simply extend the time of play to 45 NON-STOP minutes per half like soccer–yes, 45 minutes per half WITHOUT STOPPING THE CLOCK FOR ANY REASON, whether a team scores, is fouled, or steps out of bounds. A non-stop game clock would reduce all the strategic manipulation of the game clock and add more excitement to basketball and football games. What say you?
* Shout out to Carlos Reyes for this bit of information.



Time outs have become a strategy for coaches to use during games. Many coaches like to save time outs for the end of games in for bunch of different reasons. One reason is to be able to draw up a potential game tying or perhaps winning shot or play. Another reason is coaches like to call time outs at the end of the game to give there tired pkayers a little rest when they need it most at the end of game. Another strategy for timeouts is sometimes to use it to work against the other team and their players. The most common example of this is to ice the field goal kicker. In my opinion, time outs are to essential to sports like basketball and football to simply remove them and make it more like a soccer format. Thus it makes sense that since a sport like soccer has very few rules that it has no timeouts during play versus sports like basketball or football which involve many rules so it does have time outs. In order to remove times outs from football and basketball it would require to change too many rules in my opinion. As a result, it would hurt the sport we know It as and perhaps change it to such a different game we would call it a completely different sport.
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