- Seth, did you play Mario Party when you were a kid?
- I did.
I was very bad at it, but I did play.
- Same, yeah, I was terrible.
In my house, we had kind of a bum Nintendo 64 unit
that would shut down if you touched it or bumped it
or breathed on it the wrong way.
If you felt cheated
or that the game was being played unfairly,
you could accidentally step on it or move it
and basically shut the game down.
- Okay, so like a proto-rage quit.
I just kinda like, oops, tap the machine.
- Yeah, exactly.
I found a rule that is a lot like that for a sport.
It's the harshest rule I think we've talked about
on this series, and it is for a sport that I know
really almost nothing about, Australian rules football.
Do you?
- Can't say I'm an expert.
Should we apologize in advance?
Like, hey.
- Please feel free to leave a comment
if you feel like you need to,
but we're telling you right now, not our bag.
So Australian rules football is played
on this oval pitch or field.
- [Seth] Great.
- And the goal basically is to try and get the ball
through these four posts that are on either side.
The really crazy thing about it is that
in the top leagues, the men play with
18 players on the field per side,
so that's like 36 dudes on the field,
and then each team can also have four reserve players
in what they call the interchange bench.
And throughout the game, you can substitute
one of the players on the field
with one of the players on the interchange bench.
And you can kinda do it whenever you want.
That leads sometimes to there being a lot happening,
and if you end up with 19 men,
if you end up with an extra man on the field,
the other team, if they notice, can enact the headcount rule
which I think is law five-five in the rule books.
If the opposing team says,
"hey I think there's too many men on the field,"
the referees stop the game, they stop the clock,
and they have everyone from each team
line up in the middle of the field
and they go down and they count
how many players are on the field for each team.
And if you have, indeed, 19 men on the field,
then any score that you have made up until that point
is immediately wiped out to zero.
- Just because you got a 19th guy one time?
- Because you have an extra man on the field.
Even if he was just there for a few seconds,
if you get caught during the headcount with an extra man,
goose egg.
- That is brutal.
- Isn't that crazy? - That is a strong
disincentive for what seems like a potentially
innocent mistake.
- And also not a huge impact on the game, I don't think.
I don't think having an extra man, 19 to 18,
is that big of an advantage that would equate to
you needing to forfeit
basically playing the entire game up to that point.
They also keep certain things from the players,
like what the exact score is at any time
or how much time you have on the clock.
- Because who cares?
- Because who cares, which I actually think
is a little bit more fun.
You don't really know where you are.
So there are cases that I found in the research
where this rule was applied.
The other team had their score wiped out,
but the score that the players thought was still happening
was like really close, so they were playing as though
it was a close game and then found out after,
oh, we were actually 60 points ahead
for the entire fourth quarter or whatever.
It's insane.
- You got 18 guys on the field.
You happen to have one more guy by accident,
and you could lose everything.
- Everything.
The craziest story that I could find of this happening
happened in 1975 for the SANFL,
which is the South Australian National Football League.
West Torrens was playing West Adelaide,
and West Torrens had an injury on the field,
a guy with a concussion or something like that,
and they sent their substitute on the field
before they pulled that guy off on the stretcher,
who's obviously not playing.
I think there's still 18 able-bodied people on the field.
- And this dude probably needed some help,
so he couldn't just walk off the field.
- Right, well, West Adelaide said, no no no no no,
that's bullshit, and called for a headcount.
So the officials called a timeout
and started to have people come to the center of the field
for the count.
But the West Torrens team started to run off the field
so that they couldn't be counted.
And the West Adelaide team started
pushing the West Torrens players back on the field
to make sure that they were counted.
And chaos erupted, to the point where
a player named Norm Dare on the West Torrens team
jumped over the fence and hid under a fan's coat
so that he wouldn't be counted in the headcount.
And eventually the official said,
this is madness, it's chaos.
There's no way for us to know who was actually on the field
when the headcount was called,
so we're just gonna keep playing as though it didn't happen
and hope that it doesn't affect.
- Probably the right way to deal with that.
- Probably the right way to deal with it.
- You'd like to think that people would be
a little more sensitive to the fact that
you're counting heads and one of those heads
recently had its brain slammed against its skull
and not make a big deal out of that.
I do like the idea of people hiding though.
Something that came to mind was like,
you know you've got 19 people on the field,
you don't want to get caught,
and so you try to camouflage.
- Or maybe when you line up,
you have your smallest guy hide behind someone else.
- Yeah, or you musical chairs it
so people are moving around really quickly
and they can't really be counted.
- But I think grabbing a fan's coat and hiding,
I hope it was a West Torrens fan
and not the opposing team's fan
who's now like, this guy is in my coat.
Also, I couldn't find if the coat
was still on the person or not.
I don't know if the coat was just laying around
or it was just a really big coat and he just
was hiding under,
like two kids in a trench coat style sort of a move.
It becomes a game within a game.
You want to count 19 people,
you gotta catch all 19 people.
- Yeah, good luck.
- Good luck, asshole.
What is striking to me is there's no,
I can't think of a harsher penalty in any sport.
- Because it is an existential penalty.
You will lose everything you have done in this game
for a perfectly understandable,
potentially innocent mistake.
- Correct.
- I don't think you would do that on purpose, given,
knowing the penalty, and so, it's not like someone
brutally hurt someone else or you cheated
or any number of things that a sports team might do
that really deserve a huge penalty.
It's just one extra guy on the field.
- Yeah, it just kind of reminded me of those days where
if you thought your opponent was cheating,
you could just run up real quick and hit the reset button.
- I think in this case, the equivalent would be,
if you're worried about the score of the game,
you go onto the sideline of the opponent
and just kinda shove someone on the field.
Oops, 19 guys.
- 19 guys, oh, that's a zero, you have a zero now.
He has a zero.
- They're cheating, they're cheating,
they're cheating. - They're cheating.
There's 19. - They're cheating, it's over.
- Thanks for watching Weird Rules.
Don't forget to like and subscribe and all that stuff.
You can check out this other Weird Rules episode
where we talk about what happens if you score
when you have too many men on an NBA court
or this other SB Nation video.