CountryBoy19
Grandmaster
Why not? Would it also not be fair to the bench warmers that they have to miss an entire game against a good team simply because the starters are better than them?I don't think it's fair to the starters to miss almost a whole game simply because of how bad the other team is,
IMHO, it's opportunities like this that offer great chances for you to better the bench warmers by putting them in a real game and give them some full-time play. Often times when you just slip 1 or 2 of them into a big game they don't get a good chance at play because they become the "player of last resort" that the starters won't pass to unless it's their only option etc. Put all the bench warmers in and they are all on an equal playing field and get a chance to really improve themselves in a real game.
I can recall a high-school football game that went like this (actually 2 of them). #1 Ever few years our athletic conference would play a game in the Dome in Indy, it was a big deal. Our conference, at that time, was only 7 teams so we invited another team to join and there would be 4 games in 1 day, all of them conference games except for the 1 team that played the outside invitee. I have no clue who chose the invitee, and I won't mention their name, but this particular year they were pretty bad and we drew their name, we were really good. We started the game off with our starters, it was soon apparent that the JV team could get some real play time in so the JV team went in. It was still clear that they weren't going to stop our JV team either, so in went the freshman team... the freshmen still managed to stop their offense consistently and even score a few touchdowns. Probably embarrassing for them either way, but over a decade later and the only thing that really sticks out is the score on a piece of paper, and it would have been a LOT worse had we kept the varsity team playing for the whole game... #2 Incident was a sectional championship. We were always a strong FB team (we had won over 50% of sectional championships in the last 30 years at this point) and this other team had a few times they gave us a run for the money, but this year wasn't one of them. We were pounding them in the first half and for the first time ever in my coaches history, he had another coach ask him for a running clock the entire second half. It had to be embarrassing to do that, but his team was beat up, tired, and had given up. It was the right thing to do to let them have what they wanted, but the coach turned it into a teaching opportunity as well and asked us (the entire team) if we would be ok with it because he didn't want to put the other team's desires above ours. I don't think there were any dissenters that wanted a normal clock, we agreed that if they want a running clock they can have it.