Editor’s note: This is a great article by LaxMagazine’s Corey McLaughlin.  As we wait on the results of the NCAA rules committee meeting I can’t help but think we are having the same debates about the game with every generation of rules committees.

I hope they kept this disaster in mind as they hashed and rehashed all of the great ideas that they think will take our sport to the next level.  Someday, maybe everyone will realize that it’s the guys and girls out on the field that make it great.  Coaches on the sideline make it great.  But it’s not AD’s and coaches in committees that make our sport great.

As evidenced by the committee’s great idea of 1979.

College lacrosse grinded to a halt in 1979, when the NCAA eliminated faceoffs. Thirty-five years later, the debate rages on.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Thirty-five years ago, segments of the men’s lacrosse world rallied for removing the part of the game equivalent to the jump ball in basketball. Lacrosse needed to be faster and could do without a lengthy midfield scrum ensuing after every goal, two players raking or clamping and pushing and shoving to determine possession.

“There was a lot of dancing around,” Hall of Fame official Fred Eisenbrandt said of the faceoff. “The ball was in play, but out of play in a sense.”

There were problems before it started, like players taking longer than the allotted 30 seconds to sub in and out of the game, cheating or gaining an advantage (however you want to phrase it) and using trick sticks.

A good faceoff man had too much importance, some said, like when then-Johns Hopkins freshman Ned Radebaugh won 20 of 22 faceoffs in the Blue Jays’ 1978 NCAA championship game win over Cornell. That game drew 13,527 fans to Rutgers Stadium in New Jersey, a record at the time, and was broadcast by NBC. Lacrosse on TV was a new frontier, eliciting thoughts of expanding what was a niche sport to one with mass appeal. Could the game be better?

The similarities to today are striking, except for one big difference. It was 1979, the year without a faceoff.

What happened next was largely a non-event.

“It wasn’t very exciting. You kind of walked the ball into play, almost like bringing the ball up in basketball,” said Dave Huntley, the 1979 USILA Midfielder of the Year at Johns Hopkins and deputized possession starter for the Blue Jays that season, and current Team Canada general manager. “I don’t ever recall being double-teamed there. Nothing really happened. The idea that teams would play guys 50 yards from the goal was a bad bet.”

Please read the rest at LaxMagazine.com