The other thing is that smart coaches start looking at ways to exploit new rules etc and the original good intent to improve the spectacle turns in to a cluster f**k and has the opposite effect.
How about this idea.
If a team gets pinged(penalized) in a game by an average of 2 penalties a game or more for the wrestle or holding down a player to long then all players that say played more then 10 games that season and all coaching staff and head coach must pay a 10% fine of their wages at seasons end. Also $1m dollars comes off the next seasons salary cap, so if the SC is $10m, they can only spend $9m.
If they infringe again the following season, all the coaching staff and head coach included, must sit out the following season and not be allowed to coach for 12 months. The players are exempt of this 12 months sit out, because they are the secondary offenders and are simply following orders and also it would be way to disruptive to the NRL and not feasible.
This can be applied to any other type of rule infringement that is considered to be contrary to the spirit of the game and ultimately destructive to the spectacle and fans that follow and support it with their hard earned money.
Coaches like Bellamy should not be celebrated as great innovators and rewarded with ever increasing wages and premiership rings. As talented as he is a a coach, he is also a blight on the game. That part of his coaching should be penalized out of existence.
Over penalizing in a game or changing rules doesn't work long term as we have all witnessed over the last 20 odd years for a variety of reasons and the coaches know this all to well. The only way to change this type of destructive behaviour is to penalize all the culprits that created and participated in breaking the rules this way in the first place.
Appealing to their better nature or threatening or even carrying out harsh in game penalties has gotten us to this point and none of it really works and in the end we just keep getting more and more extreme rule changes that satisfy no one but the coaches who probably actually like new rules that they can be the first to exploit before the others and get an advantage over their competitors.
It just has to stop or the game will not look or feel like the same game anymore. So a more punitive approach to the actual offenders should be our course of action. Why should the game or the fans that love it wear the negative cost of what they have done?
Just like in the real world, the liability should rest on the actual offender/s that break the law. It is time we woke up to the fact that these coaches, as long as they are ultimately rewarded, will never change their manipulative behaviour unless they and the players that they instruct to behave in this manner are personally made to pay for their sins. Personal liability is always the strongest motivation for encouraging good and honest behaviour. By penalising the game and its supporters(which is what is happening when game penalties are awarded) they are laughing and thumbing their noses at us. They walk off Scott free and some with a premiership ring as a reward. How is that going to deter anyone when the rewards for breaking the rules are way more profitable then following them?
Some of you may feel that this is way to harsh, but I don't think it is harsh at all. If they play to the rules and spirit of the game then there should and would not be any penalties at all. It is up to the coaching staff to be mindful and respectful of the game and what it stands for and means to so many millions of people. They should not be in a position of power to destroy that for their own significant benefit, prestige, success and monetary gain and stuff all the rest of us.
I guarantee that if the ARLC brought in this type of rules enforcement penalties the game would finally be in safe hands and the wrestle would merely be a bad distant memory very quickly. We just need to grow some man sized balls as a game and do it.
P.S.
If a team at the end of season finals/grand final decides to run a muck and hold down or wrestle excessively during these games after having a clean and low infringement regular season then if they infringe during a game the player that gets pinged the second time during the game gets taken off for 15mins immediately and the players and coaching staff all pay a $10% fine. If they get pinged more then 3 times in a finals game they lose that game and it is awarded to the other team. If both teams transgress 3 or more times during that game, then the coaches including the head coach get to sit out the next 12 months and pay 20% in fines, plus $1m in salary cap reduction. That should deter any shenanigans at the pointy end of the season when the stakes are the highest.
