How We Play

Three principles decide every ruling in this book:

• Realism over exploits — if it would never happen on a Saturday, it does not belong here.
• Balance over spam — if nobody can stop it and you would call it forty times, that is the thing to stop calling.
• Skill over animation — win with reads, personnel and preparation, not with a mechanic the game cannot answer.

What follows are guidelines, not a penal code. They exist to make good football the easy path, and to give a commissioner something to reason from when a situation nobody wrote down turns up. Where a guideline and a principle collide, the principle wins.