JIM GAVIN insists football’s new rules can be binned or tweaked at ANY stage during the season.
The Football Review Committee chief gave his final briefing of the year on Friday before the wave of amendments to the game come into competitive action in the NFL next month.
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A new two-point scoring arc, a ‘solo and go’ option for fouled players, a new advanced mark, and a host of discipline enhancements were among the changes that emphatically passed at a special GAA congress last month.
Teams will have to keep three players in each half of the pitch at all times, and goalkeepers only receiving the ball in the opposition half and kick-outs going beyond the new 40-metre arc are among the revolutionary changes to improve the game as a spectacle.
Gavin says the break after round 2 of the NFL on February 2 will be the first major debrief for the FRC, and Croke Park chiefs have the power to wield the axe at any time if they think any of the changes are failing.
He said: “Everything is under review. Everything. It just gives the Ard Comhairle great flexibility, at the same time they need to balance out the changes in competition.
“So you can imagine say, for example that a significant amendment was made to a rule after the second round.
“Teams might rightly say, ‘well we played the first two rounds with that rule, that cost us two points in a game.’ So that would have to be balanced up by Ard Comhairle if we were ever going to do that.
“I’m a regulator and if you look at what the rule says, the rule does not speak about times and does not speak about competition. It just says that the committee can adopt or rescind based on a motion submitted by the master committee.
“So the master committee needs to put a motion to them. So there is no restriction on when that… that could happen… theoretically this could happen after the NFL one or after an All-Ireland semi-final.
“Now, they’re two extremes and would that happen? Highly, highly (unlikely). It’s so remote it’s in the 10 to the power minus whatever, like it’s out there. But that could happen, yeah.
“So even after the third or fourth round of the National League, we’ll have a lot of data of what’s happening through every game – every game.
“So, you know, trends will begin to merge, what’s working, and we hope that the benefit realisation framework will say. ‘Yeah, we’re getting value, we’re accruing value from these rule enhancements’. That’s obviously the ambition.”
Gavin’s FRC have also established a new Game Intelligence Unit, who will collate all of the data from national league action – and make it publicly available on a weekly basis.
This will include stats such as GPS and kicking data, and how often each new rule came into play across all four league divisions as they continue to assess what is working and what is not.
The former Dublin boss will disclose who is part of the new group next month, but says their work will provide vital information for players, coaches and supporters alike ahead of Gaelic Football’s new dawn.
He said: “We’ll analyse this up closely. If we’re looking through all the four divisions, through all the games taking place through each round. All of them are being analysed.
“We as a committee are working to set those thresholds that we need to measure. A lot of it is high speed running, max speed running, total distance. Stuff that any of the athletic development coaches will be measuring anyway.
“Then, hand passing, kick passing. So we’ll have that data from the games but the physical data you’ll be anonymized. You won’t know who it is.
“You’ll only know that it’s a Division1 team or a Division 2 team. They will have comparisons with the previous two seasons.
“It will require the cooperation of the teams. So I won’t know who is who…we will have a data controller that will collate the information.
“For this to work, we don’t need to name what team it is that is being benchmarked. For obvious reasons, the teams won’t want that.”
