From: wang@ibma1.cs.uiuc.edu (Eric Wang)
Subject: Re: In favor or rally scoring...(NOT)
Keywords: Rally scoring, YUK!!!
Reply-To: wang@ibma0.cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Distribution: usa
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 03:59:04 GMT

rsk@aspen.circ.upenn.edu (Rich Kulawiec) writes:
>>Rally scoring seems like a contrivance to speed up the game to make it
>>more palatable for television.

mwsn_ss@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Matthew Weasner) writes:
>What was the "official" reason for the addition of rally scoring anyway. 

As I recall, rally scoring was introduced to speed up matches to
alleviate player fatigue over the long run (e.g. a season).  As int'l vb
became more of a side-out game, good teams could drag their matches into
side-out marathons, with each game (set) taking almost an hour to play.
Some of the USA-USSR showdowns in '84 and '85 went three and a half
hours -- that's a LONG time for basically 6 starters to keep playing at
essentially a sprint.  (Unlike basketball, soccer, et al., vb is played
at nearly sprint pace -- you move as fast as you can and expend energy
in explosive bursts.  In this respect, vb is comparable (except for the
body contact) to American football: brief "live ball" periods of all-out
effort, separated by brief "dead ball" periods in which you try to catch
your breath.  But football teams alternate between an offensive unit and
a defensive unit, so everybody gets a chance to rest while the other
unit is on.  In int'l vb, the starting 6 stays in for pretty much the
entire match.)  After too many such marathon matches, a 12-person vb
team would begin to decline in performance due to excessive fatigue.
This effectively limits the number of matches a team could play in a
year and still maintain its competitive level.  I surmise that FIVB
wanted to see more int'l competition, meaning more matches per team, so
it had to find some way to place an upper bound on the energy cost of
each match.  Rally scoring seems to work pretty well; most 5-game
matches now last ~ 2.5 hours, and I haven't heard of a 3-hour match in a
couple of years.  (Most players seem to appreciate rally scoring in that
it keeps vb more a competition based on skill, technique, and the game
plan than on sheer endurance.  I seriously doubt that Timmons, at 33,
would be nearly as effective as he is if he had to play a lot of 3:30
hour matches.)

TV was probably not a significant reason for the addition of rally
scoring, for two reasons.  First, rally scoring was added long before
USA TV had significant coverage of vb matches, and no other country pays
the TV $$ that USA does, so I find it hard to believe that FIVB was
appeasing any TV concerns.  Second, and more obviously, rally-scoring
*doesn't* make vb any easier to package for TV than the old scoring
format; vb matches can still vary between 1 hour for a 3-game sweep to 3
hours for a 5-game thriller (including breaks for commercials).  This
two-hour variance is still more than enough to make the major TV
networks run for the hills, screaming and gibbering.  The AVP's
8/9/10-minute rally clock is far more effective at allowing a match to
be neatly wrapped up into a 1-hour time slot, but it's even more
controversial than rally scoring.

Eric Wang
wang@ibma0.cs.uiuc.edu