@approxinfinity
Its very frustrating to realize that the game you loved is being changed by rules that yield foreseen, and unforeseen, consequences you don't enjoy, and wish were able to be reversed.
It is one of the less pleasant aspects of aging. As with any rules changes, basketball rules changes usually have short and long term effects. When we are young, all we have to reconcile with are the short term effects, which to us are sudden, sharp, and which we make quick reconciliation with by either accepting, and continuing on with our participation in the games, or by saying, "Phooie with this, I don't like this game anymore and I am moving on to other games."
But the longer term effects of rules changes to games surface much later and they often hit us after 30, but certainly after 40. In mid life we begin to REALLY resent these changes, because: a.) we are highly invested in the games by then; and b.) we sense there is little chance that this change is going to wind back toward what we prefer, and we have had enough prior experience with negative fall out from rules changes, to be pessimistic that anything new and improved will result.
Further, long term change emerging in our 50-60s leaves us frankly bitter, and tempted by a cynicism we have to wage a constant battle against being consumed by. We realize we are unlikely to live long enough to see this undesirable change remedied,precisely because it has taken so long for it to evolve and emerge, and we know how hard it is to change anything constructively as we age. The older we get the more we realize that change tends to occur as a result of small groups of wealthy influential individuals and their firms exploiting a vulnerability in the system of a game with the sole intent of enriching themselves, while pushing the costs of their pursuit of enrichment on to those not strong enough, or rich enough, or well organized enough, to resist the change exploitative change.
I am expounding on this at the risk of boring you for a reason.
Game theory and institutions, when studied, call attentions to assumptions, rules, incentives, strategies and tendencies of play. They sensitize us--through modeling what games and the aspects of competition the games may simulate--to the individual's subjective tendency to over emphasize his POV as being most characteristic of the full panoply of play, and underestimating the influence of institutions (rules) and the strategic incentives of others interplaying with his POV and agenda to generate what is actually probable, or even possible.
Games of all kinds have much to teach us about broadening our POVs, beyond the simple enjoyment of games, and beyond how to play them well, or be knowledgeable fans and appreciate them well.
They also teach us a considerable amount about our frustrations in life, as well as what is and is not likely, regarding many competitive aspects of the world in which we live (if we are luck).
There is a concept in the study of institutions (and the game theory used to model and analyze potential institutional effects) called "institutional stickiness."
Distilled, it is easier to make and impose new rules, than revise, or get rid of old rules, because institutions are "sticky."
They get entangled and cemented into economic and political eco systems, if you will.
It is a very powerful concept, that is embraced as a kind of heuristic, that probably implies a profound underlying law of the 19th Century kind that is simply to difficult and costly to formalize, so we keep it handy as a heuristic.
Problems tempting us to solve them by imposition of rules are often very simply understood and narrowly defined.
We want problems to go away, because problems are painful.
The more simply we define problems, the fewer persons there are we have to admit are impacted by solutions proposed. So: there is real practical (if selfish) expedience and strategic self-benefit to oversimplifying problems and who will be impacted by their solution. And it almost goes without saying that cost shifting is essentially taboo to discuss until after it has been shifted.
Thus, a proposed rule intends to solve a problem defined simplistically, whether a good rule, or a stupid one, but here is the great appeal of a rule: it has little cost of materials in the making of the rule. Its black ink on white paper. Sometimes its just pixels. All it takes is a few persons that think they will benefit handsomely from creating it, plus their perception that it won't cost too much to get the rule agreed to and imposed on all of us, plus their perception that any large foreseeable and unforeseeable costs triggered will not have to be born by the small group advocating for the new rule.
Thus, there is a tendency to impose new rules, independently of whether there is a problem fixable by rules, or fixable by the rule proposed, that is driven by how much wealth is to be achieved by the small group advocating the rule and by their ability to make others accept imposition of the rule based on their belief that that new rule will make things better.
Alas, when the lying and side payments are done, many go along to get along, and almost no thinks about the unforeseen consequences, because, well, they are unforeseen. :-)
But the conditions for change are quite different, when one considers changing, or repealing a bad rule that has been around for awhile.
First, the bad rule that has been around for awhile, has likely been enriching those that promoted the rule in the first place. So: they are one influential constituency obstructing its revision, or repeal, unless they think they can come up with a rule change that continues their enrichment, or increase it.
Second, all rules, but especially bad ones, trigger a lot of sunk costs in compensating for them. All kinds of expertise from all kinds of fields is brought to bear on problems caused by bad rules to help us live with those problems until the bad rule is changed. Its bitterly ironic, but bad rules are often actually far more cemented in place by sunk costs accreted around helping us compensate for and endure the side effects of bad rules, than are good rules that seem to require little or no professional expertise to perpetuate.
Hence, even the worst rules, maybe especially the worst ideas, become vast professional and enterprise arrays of networked sunk costs embedded in the politics and economy of a culture.
We see this played out even in the seemingly innocuous game of basketball.
It seemed a good idea (to some) to let the petroshoecos give the universities and coaches endorsement money. It meant we tax payers had to pay less for the minor sports and less for hiring the coach, and so on. But down stream, we discovered (or should I say the FBI/DOJ reputedly discovered) somewhat to our chagrins that petroshoecos require certain distributions of talent among schools to pursue their business interests and this leads into incentive methods that lead into all sorts of compliance issues and PR issues and so on that require all manner of experts in law, contracting, admissions compliance, and so on to handle the risk and pain of funding minor sports and coaches salaries increasingly through the petroshoecos. And of course the petroshoecos are part of an emerging petrowear industry trying to migrate the world off natural fibers and onto petro fibers, and trying to use slave/child/peonage labor overseas in countries with often hostile political systems to achieve big margins, and using globally marketed basketball stars to increase petrowear sales abroad and at home,, and this draws Big Oil into the equation (petrowear is a huge market and so a big consumer of oil). And, well, universities are often one of the most critical and largest cash cycle activities in a state and so Big Oil and Big Shoe may have overlapping interests/agendas in both markets and politics for oil exports, oil imports, fracking, natural gas development, helium for moving gas through pipelines, oil dome storage capacities, strategic oil reserves, and so on that a state university and its state government and elected officials might be useful in promoting.
All of the preceding makes it so the folks wagging the tail of basketball would also benefit from wagging the tail of the university, and the board of regents and the state house, which still funds quite a bit of the university budget and which influences the state's choices on political economy issues influencing all manner of linkages with this now vast array of interconnected organizational interests inside and outside government.
Comical as it sounds, changing the three point stripe one foot in (or out) could have one effect on the game (or other), but also possibly a further ripple effect outwards through the organizations I have just outlined. Often, the effect of a change in the three point stripe would be insignificant in term of foreseeable outcomes. All folks can see that. But big players like Big Oil and Big Shoe and Big Government are creatures of complexity. They live with complexity and the unforeseen consequences of interacting with that complexity 24/7, or at least quarterly in their statements that drive their stock values and particularly the incentive clauses of management.
Complexity and unforeseen consequences make the Big Players prefer changes that either perpetuate the status quo (something in your example, that you increasingly find objectionable), or change that so vastly benefits them alone that they do not have to worry much about unforeseen consequential enrichment of potential adversaries downstream. As a result, in the tiny insignificant backwater of college basketball, either nothing in the way of rules changes can happen without the watchful, cautious eye of this vast network of self interested big players, even for good reason, or only something that vastly, asymmetrically enriches those already embedded and being nourished like ticks attached to a blood reservoir the size of the Lake of the Ozarks. (Note: Jason Bateman's OZARKS series, though not filmed much on location, is quite fascinating in a dark, one-eyed, occult sort of green tinged light way, but I digress.).
All of the above is a long way of saying be careful what new rules you wish for, because you only have to enrich a relative few to bring them about. And don't hold out a lot of hope for changing bad rules without one helluva dog fight, because existing rules are cemented in often vast and unexpected ways to unexpected players that you may not have the fire power to face down and prevail over.
The above is old news and mastery of the obvious to many.
But sometimes old news is worth remastering in an age of fake news.
Rock Chalk!
