Lately I’ve been amused by sports where the scoring system involves a panel of judges holding up scorecards.

Most sports are not like this. They measure an individual’s or a team’s performance through the accumulation of points, from goals and such (e.g. football, basketball), or by the length of time or number of actions it took to complete a course (e.g., running, golf).

But some sports are. Gymnastics, figure skating, DanceSport. It seems to me that the judges and the scorecards are there because there’s no other way to evaluate someone’s performance. There are no goals to be scored, no clock to be beaten, so how do you determine a winner? Judges are the last resort of sport design.

They don’t have to be, though. I can easily imagine adding a panel of judges to a football game.

They’d be sitting at a table off to the side of the field (in formalwear, of course), and after the game, or perhaps in reaction to various events of the game in real time, they would hold up their scorecards to express their rating of a team’s performance. This rating would be wholly independent of whatever points the teams have scored through actual goals, and could incorporate factors like the physique of the players, or the gracefulness of their movements, or the artistry with which they kick the ball, or their sportsmanship on and off the field. At the end the judges’ scores could either supplement the point scores (they could be added together) or replace them entirely.

In all likelihood such a change to the scoring of football would incite a lot of anger from football fans, what with how subjective it is and whatnot, so I don’t see it happening anytime soon.