"The Rule"

Good evening. After posting on Sunday, this blog realized that it hadn't done a post on "the rule." Part of the reasoning is that most of this blog's 4 readers have heard Pun City talking about it on the street. But, in any case, for posterity, Pun City's going to post it here too.

This rule applies to men's college basketball games. There's a good chance that some variation of it could apply to other sports, but since Pun City knows college hoops best, and initially created it to be applied to the sport, this blog is sticking to just college hoops.

The rule states that if a team is leading by more points than there are minutes remaining on the game clock, and the lead in question is greater than 6 points (2 possessions), then the game is over and the team that is leading will win. A key part of this is that the minute column of the game clock is all that is considered, so if Cornell is leading Yale by 8 with 7:52 remaining, that game is over.

As you may note, this rule is not 100% effective. Matter of fact, scroll down to the previous post and you'll see an example where this rule was broken. But it's roughly 99.5% accurate, which is pretty cool. This certainly means seeing a "rule-breaking" game is truly extraordinary. This blog thinks it has only seen about 5 of such games in person, dating back to 1999. Pun City can't think of a single time a road team was able to break the rule, but definitely two occasions where the game was at a neutral site and the rule was broken. So, you heard it here, earth-shattering news, home teams with big leads win a ton.

In any case, tracking the rule can add another dimension to some blowout games, and tracking the rule being broken can help quantify how huge a comeback is. This blog isn't recommending it, but for those of you that like to bail on games early (where are you going that's more important than a college basketball game?), you could conceivably use the rule to determine a time to leave. Marquette leads Savannah State by 14 with 13:22 remaining? That game's over. Don't leave though, you could be missing some rule-breaking history.

This blog's cruising to the Marquette-Seton Hall game tonight, hopefully there's some rule breaking going on.