Pro sports rulebooks are fascinating things. They’re living documents, changing constantly as new rules are added, others are dropped, and still more are clarified and adjusted. But despite that, most of the rules are decades old and familiar to even novice fans. We never actually read the rulebook cover to cover — we’d never need to. We all know the basics, and figure that the rest are just minor details.
And that’s all true enough. But fans really should take some time to browse through the rulebook every once in a while, because there’s all sorts of weird stuff in there.