If it seems backwards that the minority of in-play blockers could be declared the pack, consider that this is already technically happening under current WFTDA rules. Should they have a reason to, the minority can gain full control of the speed of pack without needing to do much else but stay back and do nothing.
WFTDA Rules: In this situation, the heavily-penalized team gets to dictate the speed of the pack. The blue blockers can't speed up until the red blockers speed up first (if they do at all) letting the red team easily get their jammer into scoring position despite not laying a single block on the blue blockers AND being outnumbered in the pack 2-to-1.
In this example, the red team can keep the pack slow by continuing to skate slow. They control when they want the pack to speed up, because if the blue blockers are at the 10-foot split pack fringe and try to skate forward first (without the red blockers following suit) they will cross the 10-foot barrier, destroy the pack, and be penalized for initiating pack destruction. The blue blockers won’t want to slow down or drop back, as that would just make it easier for the red blockers to help clear the way for their jammer. Worst case scenario for the blue team, should the red jammer get through and push the blue blockers 10 feet ahead of the red blockers—who can continue to stay back and do nothing—it would create a no-pack scenario and legally disallow the four-member strong blue team from touching the red jammer, allowing her to score a lot of points without really having to make an effort to get around the blue blockers.
The red team can potentially enjoy all of those advantages in the pack, which are all very useful to have during the initial pass or a scoring pass. (They could only get into this position during the initial pass if both red blockers elected to stall at the line and not move forward, let’s keep in mind.) All the red team had to do to get into the catbird seat was to completely ignore the blue blockers, back away 10 feet to let the blue team take “control” of the front of the pack, AND commit a few blocker penalties to make themselves the minority group of in play.
Yeah, that’s a bunch of bullshit.
Other sports handle similar situations with a little more common sense. Field sports and their derivatives allow for a team to play with fewer players on the other team as a result of penalties. I’m talking about soccer (red cards), rugby (yellow/red cards), lacrosse (man-up situations), hockey (power plays) and yes, even basketball (foul-outs with no subs).
In all of these instances, the team down a man (or more) still has every opportunity to score or prevent the other team from scoring, but with less manpower it’s all of a sudden a hell of a lot harder to do it. As it should be, because the shorthanded team committed a penalty; it’s their own fault they put themselves into that situation.
Hockey is the best example of this. Like in roller derby, it’s possible to have a situation where (up to) two players for one team are in the penalty box, leaving one team playing with fewer players than the other team. While killing off this penalty, the shorthanded team will suddenly find themselves in a desperate situation, needing to put almost all of their energy in holding back the other team from taking advantage of the situation.
In this next video, look how easy it is for the full-strength team to gain scoring chances, and how much effort the penalized team puts into trying to deny those chances. The first two minutes of this clip shows a lengthy 5-on-3 power play, something that’s extremely rare in hockey:
Although it was all-hands on deck offensive opportunity for the full-strength team, their advantage was not an absolute one. Even with all their players on the ice, should they do something to blow that opportunity—like allow the other team to get control of the pack puck or let them get around their defense—the shorthanded team can still make an opportunity of their own, such as playing keep-away with the pack puck. And if the full-strength team royally screws up, the shorthanded team may even score on the play, against all odds.
This is another one of those truths in sports. Even if one team is put at a big advantage through penalties issued to the other team, the offensive opportunity they gain from them doesn’t mean that they can completely abandon their defensive responsibilities and stop covering their opposition. Doing so would be folly, as it would allow the other team to take the initiative and do something with it. Should the short-handed team overcome the odds, they might even be able to score despite being so penalized.
It should be the same way in roller derby.
My suggestion: (A) With two red blockers in the penalty box, a full-strength blue team can easily slow down the red jammer, seal off the remaining red blockers, and pick up lead jammer. (B) With the blue jammer clear, a blue blocker ignores the red blockers near the front of the pack to help stifle the other team's jammer at the rear to help prevent a breakout. (C) This leaves the red blockers with a 2-on-1 situation at the front of the pack, an advantage they seize to easily pass by the blue pivot. Once there is more than 10 feet of separation between the two red blockers and the blue pivot, the red blockers become redefined as the pack. (D) As a result of the blue team's defensive breakdown, the red team is able to race the pack, thwarting blue's chances at an easy scoring play, causing some blue blockers to fall out of play in the process. (E) To avoid this situation, the blue team needs to keep the red team covered at the front of the pack, letting the blue team keep the speed of play under their control. Blue's big pack advantage still lets them help their jammer and hinder the red jammer quite easily, but that doesn't mean they can ignore the red blockers entirely.
With four blue blockers against two red blockers, the blue team should have no problem covering the red blockers in the pack AND hindering the red jammer AND assisting their jammer through the pack. It would take a failure of monumental proportions for the blue team to lose the advantage gained from penalties to the other team.
Should that monumental failure happen, however, and the two red blockers get around the four blue blockers, under my suggested pack definitions rules the two red blockers will be defined as the pack should they overcome a 2-on-4 pack disadvantage and get more than 10 feet ahead of the blue blockers. This would afford them the ability to speed the pack forward as fast as they want. Basically, should the blue team allow this to happen, they done fucked up big time.
After they screw up, it would become much harder for the blue blockers to slow down the pack and help their jammer catch back up and score…and the blue blockers have no one to blame for this loss of containment but themselves. However, all hope is not lost for team blue. The blue blockers can get containment back by getting in front of one or both of the red blockers to slow them down and redefine the pack in their favor.
Or more preferably, they can avoid this situation from happening in the first place by keeping blocking help at the head of the pack at all times, always in front of the red team. That way, should the red blockers be on the verge of breaking out entirely, the blue team would have a last line of defense to try and slow them up enough for the rest of the blue team to catch back up and regain control of the situation before it gets out of hand.
But should the red blockers beat the last line of defense anyway and sprint the pack forward, it would make it difficult for them to help their jammer for her initial pass, let alone keep the pack slow enough to help her come around quickly and score; never mind the fact that they would still need to prevent the blue jammer from getting through to score for the blue team. That is, the two red blockers would need to be able to hold back four blue blockers and the blue jammer for an extended period of time while their own jammer is circulating.
Would it be possible for the red team to score in this situation? Yes. But is it probable? Hell, no. But making scoring an afterthought—even with your jammer on the track—is the situation you put yourself in when you commit a lot of penalties and are forced to kill off two of them at the same time.
In this scenario, the red team would have to all but abandon thinking offensively and switch to desperation defense mode, much like the hockey team that finds themselves killing off two penalties simultaneously. However, should the blue team really mess up and all the red blockers to evade their blocks, the red team can still capitalize on that mistake and move to the front of the pack, speeding things along and making it harder for the blue team to take advantage of their situation. This failure on the blue team’s part would both make it much harder for them to score (unless they do something about it) and give the red team a shadow of a chance to give their jammer an opportunity to score (should the blue team mess up big-time).
But in the end, if the red team didn’t want to be put in this all-but-hopeless situation for a period of time, their blockers should have stayed out of the penalty box in the first place. Having fewer blockers on the track should give a team fewer options to combat the other team from slowing down or speeding up the pack, not to mention making it easier for the other team’s jammer to evade the thinner opposing pack members.
Power Jams and Jammer Penalties
Roller derby is a unique sport in that it requires its players to be on offense and defense at the same time. However, this notion of simultaneously playing offense and defense is broken during a power jam, when only one team’s jammer is out on the track.
Classic roller derby rules required that a team fielded a jammer (and pivot and at least one blocker) on the track at any given time. Back then, if jammer committed a penalty, the player would go to the box (during the next jam), but the jammer position would still take the track for the next jam. The team would therefore skate the next jam one blocker down, effectively turning a jammer penalty during one jam, into a blocker penalty for the next jam.
This is much like how penalties work in hockey. Should a hockey goaltender commit a penalty, the goalie isn’t sent to the box for two minutes; that would be ridiculously unfair for team to have to defend an empty net for that long. That would lead to an easy goal for the other team, even if that team had more players in the penalty box. For that reason, the offending goaltender (the player actually committing the penalty) gets to stay on the ice as a regular player sits in the sin bin to serve the penalty for him.
Believe it or not, these two exact same situations occur in WFTDA rules…only in reverse.
In WFTDA play, a jammer can be penalized, sit in the penalty box while she watches her team score a lot of points, come up to the line with the star on the next jam, and then score a lot more points herself. If this sounds impossible (a jammer sitting in the penalty box can’t score points) you’d be right if roller derby made sense. But because it doesn’t always, you have the practice known as poodling.
If a player who normally plays jammer takes an intentional fourth minor penalty while lining up as blocker before a jam, she can turn that blocker penalty into one less (potential) jammer penalty in the next jam. This makes sure she starts the subsequent jam with as clean as a penalty slate as possible. Basically, the jammer committing the penalty gets to sit in the penalty box in the jam before she was likely to be boxed for accumulating minor penalties. It’s just that this “jammer” was really a blocker at the time she retrospectively swept her minor penalties under the rug.
The practice of wanting to intentionally penalize yourself is a bit suspect. Why would you ever want to willingly want to put your team at a disadvantage? There are certain times and situations for intentional penalties, yes. But not multiple times during a game.
Teams that trade a blocker penalty for assurance that their jammer stays on the track during the next jam can only mean that they feel one blocker penalty is inconsequential to the effect a jammer penalty would have on their team. That is, even though one blocker penalty or one jammer penalty is still just one penalty, 10 out of 10 poodling teams will tell you that they’d gladly trade a “meaningless” blocker penalty for a ”really-bad-for-our-team” jammer penalty.
Question is, why isn’t that blocker penalty as equally consequential as the jammer penalty? Shouldn’t all penalties carry equal consequences to the teams that commit them?