Genre Turning Point / Sports

American football

• Walter Camp, a player and later head coach at Yale University and the "Father of American Football", codified much of the sport's basic ruleset and marked the beginning of its emergence as a separate sport from Rugby Union, from which it was derived. In 1880, he reduced the number of players each team was allowed to field at one time from fifteen to eleven, a move that elevated speed rather than strength as the most important attribute on the field, and came up with the line of scrimmage (where each down with a team holding uncontested possession of the ball instead of a contested scrum for it) and the snap from the center to the quarterback. In 1882, he instituted a rule that required teams to advance the ball five yards (later increased to ten) in the course of three downs in order to maintain possession, largely to speed up the action on the field and prevent any one team from holding the ball for the entire game. He also came up with the standard size of the modern football field, most of the scoring rules, the safety play, the below-the-belt tackle, and the legalization of interference, or blocking, which was illegal in rugby but became a defining characteristic of American football.
• In the late 19th century and the first few years of the 20th, American football, at both the professional and collegiate levels, was a notoriously brutal sport that saw many players die on the field, with newspaper editorials openly comparing it to the Gladiator Games of Ancient Rome. This eventually came to a head in 1905 when, amidst growing calls to ban the sport entirely and many schools switching to rugby, United States President Theodore Roosevelt, a man famous for his celebration of physical activity and "the Strenuous Life" and a big-time fan of college football, stepped in and held a series of meetings with coaches and representatives from the college football powers of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to create a new ruleset for a safer game, especially with his own son Theodore Jr. now a freshman playing for the Harvard team (and having already suffered a broken nose on the field). The new rules, put in place at the start of the 1906 college football season, legalized the forward pass, abolished the "mass movement plays" (most notably the "flying wedge" or "V-trick" formation) where both teams charged headlong at each other from across the field at speed, created a neutral zone between offense and defense, and doubled the first-down distance to 10 yards, while also creating a new organizing body for college football, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (now known as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA). Fatalities and injuries declined sharply in the next few years, and football shed its brutish reputation and emerged as one of America's premier sports.
• In 1913, the football team from an obscure Catholic college in northern Indiana traveled to West Point, New York to take on Army, one of college football's powers. The forward pass had been legalized seven years earlier, but was still considered a risky novelty play. Over the previous summer, Notre Dame's quarterback Gus Dorais and receiver Knute Rockne worked as lifeguards on Lake Erie and practiced throwing and receiving on the beach. Their coach Jesse Harper decided to use a pass-based offensive scheme against Army. Notre Dame humiliated Army 35-13. Their win legitimized passing as an offensive tool, which opened up the game and made it more exciting, and kickstarted Notre Dame's status as a college football icon.
• An obscure, but important, one: in the early days of the NFL, the championship went to the team with the best record. In 1932 the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans ended the season tied, so the league set up a one-game playoff to be hosted by the Bears. But a blizzard was forecast, so the game was moved to Chicago Stadium, the city's three-year-old events coliseum, and played on a shortened field that could fit inside the arena. While the Bears won the game 9-0, the game's importance extended way beyond just deciding a league championship. Football games played indoors, postseason playoffs, and a special championship game—much of the modern NFL was invented that night in Chicago. The NFL itself liked some of the adjustments needed to accommodate the indoor field so much that it adopted them permanently for all games the next season: placing hash marks on the field (which were necessary to keep the teams away from the barricaded sidelines as much as possible; now used in all levels of football) and placing goal posts on the goal line instead of the back of the end zone (though the NFL moved them back in 1974).
• The creation of the Ivy League in 1954 essentially removed eight of the most storied college football programs in the country from national contention. What's more, this was the whole point; they saw the sport as having grown overly commercialized by The '50s, to the point of threatening the academic integrity of the schools participating, and wished to maintain their programs while preserving their reputations as top-flight universities. If doing so meant all but abandoning the rest of the college football world (outside the similarly-minded Patriot League, which they formed to give themselves additional teams to play), then so be it.
• The 1958 NFL Championship Game between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts, also called "The Greatest Game Ever Played", was the first NFL playoff game to go into sudden-death overtime, and the game was nationally televised by NBC, with an estimated 45 million people watching it. At the time, baseball was still the preeminent sport in America, and while it would remain so for at least another decade, the 1958 NFL Championship Game marked the beginning of football's rise to prominence, and eventual usurpation of baseball as America's top sport. The Colts' 86-yard drive to tie the game at the end of regulation and force overtime is also cited as the first "two-minute drill". While several other games since could claim the title of "Greatest Ever", when most people reference the turning point of pro football, this game generally given credit.
• Initially, field goal kickers kicked the ball towards the goal posts straight on, the results being that most field goals didn't have much distance and their accuracy was iffy at best (60% or so). Then in The '60s^note There had been a few scattered European-born kickers in the college ranks in The '50s who kicked soccer-style, Pete Gogolak and others popularized the angled, soccer-style kick for field goals, increasing distance and accuracy and immediately improving the viability of field goals tremendously. Today, the soccer-style kick is used professionally almost exclusively (the NFL's last conventional-style kicker, Mark Moseley, retired in 1986).
• And the place kick (straight on) replaced the drop kick, where the kicker dropped it like a punter and let it hit the ground before kicking it. The last time it was used was by Doug Flutie in his final NFL game in 2006 as an homage.
• The "Heidi game" on November 17, 1968 is so named because NBC cut away from a game between the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets that was running long and which the Jets were about to win so that they could air their scheduled programming, a TV adaptation of Heidi. As a result, viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones missed the Raiders' Miracle Rally in which they scored two touchdowns in the final minute of the game to beat the Jets 43-32, often considered one of the greatest moments in pro football history. Since then, Sports Preemption has been standard policy at every American TV network, who will never cut away from a major league sports game, no matter how long it runs and no matter how much of a Foregone Conclusion it may seem, lest they wind up with the same egg on their face that NBC did when so many angry viewers called in to complain that the fuses on their phone line switchboards all blew out.^note Ironically, NBC did decide at the last minute to let the game run past 7 PM when Heidi was scheduled to start, but their phone lines were jammed from all the people calling in to ask if the game would air to the end, meaning that the network's central control never got the memo. This produced another, smaller turning point: afterwards, NBC installed a dedicated "Heidi phone" connected to a separate exchange to prevent such a situation where network personnel can't communicate.
• The New York Jets' upset victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in 1969 arguably lent the American Football League credibility against the more established National Football League. It helped that Jets' quarterback Joe Namath's "guarantee" that the Jets would win added to the pregame hype (unheard of in the previous two games). The Kansas City Chiefs' win over the Minnesota Vikings the following season proved that it wasn't a one-shot fluke deal for the AFL, validating the merger that had been agreed to in 1966 and would take effect in 1970.
• By The '50s, most football coaches still saw passing as only being viable in situations where an offense needed a lot of yardage, with the prevailing attitude being "Three things can happen when you pass and two of them are bad", i.e., an incompletion or an interception (that line is variously attributed to college coaching legends Woody Hayes and Darrell Royal). But starting in that decade coaches began experimenting with offenses that preferred short passes over running plays to move the ball, and these days almost all football teams use some variation on this idea as the basis of their offense. Two pro games in particular are seen as being watershed moments that demonstrated the effectiveness of a well-executed passing scheme.
  • The 1963 American Football League championship game, played on January 5, 1964. San Diego Chargers head coach Sid Gillman was that era's top advocate for the passing game, and in their matchup against the Boston Patriots (before they changed their name to New England), the Chargers ran the strategy to perfection, opening up the field and thoroughly confusing the Patriot defense. The Chargers led 31-10 at halftime on the way to a 51-10 rout, with QBs Tobin Rote and John Hadl combining for 305 yards and three TDs on 26 attempts, with the Chargers racking up over 600 yards of total offense as well.
  • The November 17, 1975 Monday Night Football game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Buffalo Bills saw a stark contrast in philosophies, as the pass-happy Bengals hosted the run-based Bills. Bills star running back O. J. Simpson had a fairly good game, rushing for 197 yards and 2 touchdowns, but Bengals QB Ken Anderson absolutely torched the Bills defense, passing for 447 yards and 2 TDs, as the Bengals won 33-24, having led the entire game. With a prime time audience witnessing the dominant performance, fans became more appreciative of pass-based football. Bengals offensive coordinator Bill Walsh would go on to build the San Francisco 49ers dynasty of The '80s around passing.
• In 1978, the NFL introduced several rule changes in an effort to encourage more scoring on offense and generally make the games more exciting to watch. Perhaps the biggest change was the rule that effected defensive backs; previously, defenders could make contact with receivers anywhere on the field past the line of scrimmage. The new rules limited contact between defenders and receivers to up to five yards past the line of scrimmage and no further, with any further contact resulting in pass interference. Often called the "Mel Blount Rule", after the Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback who was known for being an extremely physical player, it opened up the passing game and forever changed the way offense was played in the NFL. Oddly enough, it was the Steelers who would win Super Bowl XIII, the first Super Bowl played under the new rules.
• January 2, 1987: Penn State, ranked #2, upset #1 Miami (Florida) 14-10 in the Fiesta Bowl to win the 1986 national championship. The turning point wasn't so much the game itself, but the circumstances surrounding it. It wasn't the first time that the top 2 teams had met in a bowl game, or the first time a "New Year's Day bowl" was played on January 2nd (that was the usual custom when New Year's fell on a Sunday). But since both teams were independent at the time and didn't have any bowl game tie-ins, this allowed the Fiesta Bowl to arrange the matchup and heavily promote it as the "national championship game." NBC, who aired the game, decided to move it to January 2nd, which was a Friday, so it could air on its own and wouldn't compete with the other bowls. The game generated hype that was comparable to a Super Bowl, and wound up becoming the most-viewed college football game up to that point in time. In the immediate aftermath, the Fiesta Bowl became one of the major bowl games, joining the Rose, Sugar, Orange, and Cotton bowls. Later on, the idea of an arranged championship game played after New Year's became the basis of the Bowl Championship Series and the current College Football Playoff.
• The introduction of the salary cap and free agency in the 1994 season was designed to create parity in the NFL and to level the playing field, i.e., to prevent potential dynasties for dominant teams, and to give losing teams a chance. The idea of parity was summed up by former NFL Commissioner Bert Bell, who once said that "any team can beat any other team on any given Sunday."
• Before the 2011 season, the NFL increased restrictions on what defensive backs could do to impede receivers. Although they were meant with safety in mind, this opened up offense in previously unseen ways. Before, you would see about a half-dozen games in a given season where a QB would reach 400 yards in a game; almost overnight, it became a weekly occurrence, starting with an ominous Week 1 where rookie Cam Newton threw for over 400 yards in his very first pro game. The passing game has now become so prolific that it has rendered the days of 25-carry-a-game RBs almost obsolete ^note  in addition to pass-heavy offenses having an edge, there has also been a growing philosophy that most teams have adopted, using a 2-RB system that keeps two guys fresh all year while giving defenses different looks; one will usually be a faster, shiftier back and the other more of an up-the-middle bruiser; in 2013, no RB was taken in the first round of the draft for the first time in the Super Bowl era. In 2014, no RB was taken in the first round yet again. Although every subsequent draft through 2021 saw an RB go in the first round, none went in the top 20 between Saquon Barkley going #2 in 2018 and Bijan Robinson and Jahmyr Gibbs going #8 and #12 in 2023, and no RB went in the first round in 2022.

Association football/soccer

• One of the earliest examples of a turning point would be 1925 and the polishing of the Offside rule by the governing body of the Football League (who would later form the International Football Association Board, IFAB, the government body which decides the changes to the game's rules): by reducing the amount of players that decided the validation of a goal to the goalkeeper and the last field player (previously the requirements were of two field players and the GK), matches went on from boring, few-goal matches to more entertaining matches. This also produced a change in the usual tactics, as the previously popular 2-3-5 tactic^note Two defenders, three midfielders, five attackers would fall short against new tactics such as the "WM"^note 3-4-3 of sorts, and more defenders were placed near the goalkeeper.
• The 1953 football match between England and Hungary is widely regarded as the moment when the modern game came into being. The Hungarians, playing a then-unknown tactical style, outclassed the English, who until that point had never been defeated at home by a team from outside the British Isles. In the aftermath, the old English formations and tactics vanished, and the continental tactics, training, and equipment became the standard around the world.
• The "Battle of Santiago" match between Chile and Italy in 1962. While violence in football was nothing new, this game saw several tackles, foul play, and injuries throughout the game. In response to this match, the referee knew there had to be some way to tone down the violence, and so invented the yellow and red penalty cards commonly used today in both football and many other sports.
• In The '80s, British football's long battle with hooliganism culminated in the Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989, where 94 fans died on the day and three more died later from their injuries^* one a few days later, one in 1993, and one in 2021, and hundreds more were injured thanks to a catastrophic failure in crowd control.^note Note that there was no actual hooliganism involved in the disaster — suggesting that there was is a massive Berserk Button for Liverpool fans, to the point that The Sun, a tabloid that heavily pushed such accusations, is still widely boycotted in the city. Rather, the catch fences at the front of the stand, which had been added as an anti-hooliganism measure, instead acted as a barrier against which the fans were crushed during the overcrowding, instead of safely spilling out onto the pitch. After Hillsborough, Britain's aging, decrepit stadiums were replaced or saw extensive renovations; stadiums were made all-seating, with standing-room terraces, fences, and crash barriers taken out, and alcohol was banned outside the concession stands. Most importantly, however, the shocked reaction to Hillsborough showed that football wasn't just a sport of the working class, but was enjoyed by all parts of British society. Between that and the safety changes made in the aftermath (many of which also did the job of stopping hooligans), football soon became a sport that it was possible to bring a family to, without fear of getting stomped on in a riot.
• Related to the above, the Liverpool vs. Arsenal match on 26 May 1989 to determine the winner of the First Division, held six weeks after Hillsborough, has been credited (along with the creation of Sky TV) with saving the institution of British football. The Liverpool fans, who by rights should've been livid with having the title snatched from under their noses in the last ten seconds of the league (the celebratory champagne was even on its way to the Liverpool dressing room), instead chose to applaud Arsenal's well-deserved victory. It was clear, from that day forward, that the age of hooliganism was over, and that rioting, property damage, and grievous injury would no longer be the expected outcome of a match.
• The popularity of soccer in the United States skyrocketed after the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup. After the event, a professional league (Major League Soccer) was established in the US, and television ratings for matches have soared, with an estimated 24 million people watching the 2014 World Cup match between the US and Portugal.
• The 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup Final. After the United States won the final match against China to take home the championship, US player Brandi Chastain, who had scored the winning goal, took off her jersey and started cheering and flexing while wearing only a sports bra. This display of bravado, almost unheard of for female athletes at the time, wound up on the cover of several major magazines and newspapers, with Sports Illustrated's head-on cover shot◊ becoming one of the most iconic sporting images of the decade, earning both soccer and women's sports in general a massive boost of credibility in the US.

Baseball

• The Black Sox scandal in 1919, where eight players on the Chicago White Sox were caught throwing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds after betting against their own team, nearly destroyed baseball as a mainstream sport, and forced Major League Baseball to make serious changes if it wanted to restore the public's trust in the fairness and integrity of games.
  • The National Baseball Commission that governed MLB was abolished and replaced with a single Commissioner of Baseball who wielded broad, near-absolute power to regulate the sport. The first Commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, immediately used his power to impose a lifetime ban on all of the "eight men out" and two others who were believed to be involved in the scandal.
  • Beyond just baseball, the affair is credited with creating a strong taboo within the American professional leagues against any involvement in gambling in order to prevent even the possibility of such a scandal happening again, a taboo that would hold until the 2010s (as noted below).
  • Finally, it was a turning point in the professionalization of baseball, and of the major leagues in general. Before the scandal, gambling and game-fixing were tolerated at a low level, as allowing players to make money betting on games meant that the teams' owners didn't have to pay them as much. The scandal was a hard lesson in how a combination of low salaries and tacit acceptance of gambling could lead players to decide that they could make more money throwing games than playing fair. The '20s and '30s saw players' salaries go up in order to keep them honest, leading to the rise of the modern "superstar" athlete.
• The so-called "dead ball era" ended in 1921, which allowed Babe Ruth to popularize the idea of the home run, shifting much of baseball's offensive focus from baserunning speed to long-ball power. Indeed, Ruth "invented" a fairly common player type in modern baseball: the fat, left-handed power hitter/outfielder.
• Jackie Robinson's breaking down the color line was this for more than just the sports world. Not only did it create interest in successful Negro League players, but their style of play began to influence the Major Leagues, most notably with how it brought importance back to base running. It was also an early turning point in white America's acceptance of the idea that black people weren't so different from them.
• The airing of Major League Baseball games on television in The '50s destroyed most of the minor leagues, who couldn't compete with the bigger games being shown on TV.
• The move of the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers to, respectively, San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1957 will probably never be forgiven by New York sports fans, but it helped popularize baseball outside the East Coast and the Midwest and led to a surge of teams moving to sunny Southern and Western cities, securing the sport's national viability for the rest of the century. It also effectively destroyed the Pacific Coast League (which was, until then, seen as a growing rival to Major League Baseball), pushing it down into the minors and securing MLB's position as the dominant baseball league in the US.
• Maury Wills helped repopularize the stolen base in the early 1960s.
• Rollie Fingers and Goose Gossage were central to the idea of the dedicated relief pitcher/closer in the 1970s, paving the way for the modern game's reliance on the bullpen.
• The 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Red Sox, one of the most exciting matchups in sports history, was the moment at which television finally understood how to broadcast baseball. Carlton Fisk's iconic home run in Game 6 provided a catalyst in getting camera operators to focus most of their attention on the players themselves. It's no coincidence that, after the '75 World Series, a new lucrative TV deal involving not just NBC, but ABC was made.
• When the Baltimore Orioles opened Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992, it was viewed as an interesting curio—a Genre Throwback stadium built to evoke the style of older ballparks^note Though it wasn't the first "retro-classic" ballpark, that honor goes to Pilot Field (now Sahlen Field), a minor league stadium in Buffalo, NY opened in 1988. But it was also a huge success, and encouraged other Major League teams to move away from the prefab multi-use stadiums of The '60s and The '70s that they often shared with NFL teams, and into the baseball-specific stadiums that are now the norm.
• The early success of Hideo Nomo after signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1995 paved the way for Major League Baseball's interest in Japanese players.
• The rise of sabermetrics, also known as "Moneyball" after a famous book written about it (which later received a film adaptation), to mainstream prominence in the '00s led to a revolution in how baseball players were recruited. By focusing on runs scored as the most important metric for how games were won, a great deal of the conventional wisdom for what made a good baseball player was heavily challenged, while previously undervalued players were recruited and used to build winning teams on a much smaller budget than the major baseball powers — most famously the Boston Red Sox, who won the World Series in 2004 and ended an 86-year championship drought. While the proponents of sabermetrics were dismissed as geeks at the time, since then the success of the teams they built has left them Vindicated by History, and sabermetrics has become the standard for study of baseball.
• The fallout of a Congressional investigation into steroid abuse in 2005, the resulting Mitchell Report in 2007, and the drug policy implemented in response has lead teams in the present day to favor rosters of players with versatility and sound fundamentals again, as aging, one-dimensional sluggers can no longer rely on medical help to extend their careers with eye-popping home run totals. In turn, this has led to what has been called the "age of the pitcher" in modern baseball, with substantially fewer hits, at-bats, and home runs and far more no-hitter games and strikeouts than in the past.

Basketball

• In the early years of basketball, there was a jump ball after every made basket, which meant that games were slow-paced and low-scoring. In 1937 it was eliminated and replaced with the inbounds pass, which marked a major step forward in the evolution of the sport.
• A similar major step forward for the evolution of basketball occurred in the 1954-55 NBA season, which was when they introduced the shot clock. Before it was introduced, games were still slow-paced, with the 1950-51 season showing off both the lowest-scoring game in NBA history and the longest NBA game ever. While the NBA has stuck with the 24-second shot clock since it first was introduced, other leagues like the NCAA and WNBA have introduced 30-second and even 35-second shot clocks for their games after the NBA became more successful with it.
• Two college basketball games played on the same floor seven years apart are credited as the catalysts for the sport moving away from shots always being done with both hands, usually in a stationary position. In 1936, Stanford traveled to Madison Square Garden in New York to take on Long Island, ranked #1 at the time. Stanford forward Hank Luisetti had developed a style of shooting with one hand while running, which helped Stanford to a highly-publicized 45-31 upset win. Then in 1943, Wyoming beat Georgetown 46-34 in the NCAA tournament championship game at the Garden, with point guard Ken Sailors becoming the Trope Codifier for the jump shot, earning the tournament's MVP award in the process.
• "Pistol Pete" Maravich, one of the greatest players of The '70s and of all time, brought the no-look circus pass in the NBA, and helped to make American basketball into a far more flamboyant sport.
• Maravich's contemporary, Julius "Dr. J" Erving, paved the way for flashy basketball players with devastating dunks in the NBA. People like Clyde Drexler, Dominique Wilkins, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Magic Johnson all owe something to the path he paved.
• The 1979 NCAA basketball championship between Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores and Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans breathed new life into college basketball. Five years later, the 1984 NBA Finals between Bird's Boston Celtics and Magic's Los Angeles Lakers helped spark a revival in the NBA, which had languished in popularity before the pair entered the league.
• While the 1979 Bird–Magic showdown breathed new life into the college game, it was March 14, 1981 that cemented the NCAA tournament as a place where anything could happen:
  • Early in the afternoon, Mideast Region top seed DePaul took on Saint Joseph's in the first round. The favored Blue Demons took a seven-point lead into the locker room at halftime, but the Hawks cut the deficit to 48–47 in the last minute. With 13 seconds left, the Hawks fouled Skip Dillard, known as "Money" for his excellent free throw shooting... but he missed the front end of the one-and-one. Saint Joe's got the rebound and went down the court without calling a timeout. Bryan Warrick got the ball to Lonnie McFarlan, who was open on the baseline. Two Blue Demons closed on McFarlan, but that left John Smith wide open under the basket, and Smith yelled at him. McFarlan switched in midair to pass to Smith, who put in a layup to give the Hawks a 49–48 upset.
  • Later that afternoon in the Midwest Region, Arkansas took on defending national champion Louisville. After the Cardinals took a one-point lead with 5 seconds left, Arkansas coach Eddie Sutton called timeout, telling his Razorbacks to get the ball to guard U.S. Reed. His team did just that, with Reed dribbling the ball to near half-court and launching a desperation shot that hit nothing but net, giving the Hogs a 74–73 win.^note The NCAA didn't adopt the three-pointer for men's play until the 1986–87 season. In the NCAA women's game, the three was an experimental rule in that season and became mandatory in the next.
  • Moments after this game, the West Region matchup between Kansas State and top seed Oregon State also came down to the last second. The favored Beavers led by as much as 11 in the second half, but K-State came back to tie the game at 48 with 3:23 left. OSU's All-America center Steve Johnson fouled out, and both teams took turns stalling until the Beavers missed the front end of a one-and-one. The Wildcats got the rebound and held the ball for the last shot. With 2 seconds left, Rolando Blackman drained a fall-away jumper while double-teamed for the win.
• The NCAA tournament expanded noticeably in the next few years, going from 48 to 52, 53, and then 64 teams by 1985. However, by 1989 there was serious talk of downsizing the tournament and eliminating automatic bids for smaller conferences. But two games in that year's tournament ended that talk for good. On Thursday, March 16, the Southeast Region's 16th seed, East Tennessee State, led top seed Oklahoma for the majority of the game (leading by 17 at two different points), but fell 72–71, missing a desperation halfcourt heave at the buzzer. Not to be outdone, on Friday, March 17, the East Region's 16th seed, Ivy League member Princeton, similarly took top seeded Georgetown to the wire, with a chance to win on the game's final possession before Georgetown's future Hall of Famer Alonzo Mourning blocked two Tiger shots to allow the Hoyas to escape with a 50–49 win. In particular, Princeton's near-upset has been called "the game that saved March Madness", since it was broadcast in a key Friday night prime time slot on ESPN and attracted a huge audience (the Oklahoma–ETSU game was a Thursday afternoon matchup that ESPN aired on late night tape delay). The games not only ended any plans to downsize the tournament, but are also credited with convincing CBS to sign a new contract to televise the tournament, and two years later to take over first-round TV coverage from ESPN.
• February 27, 2013. The Golden State Warriors take on the New York Knicks, with emerging Golden State star Stephen Curry dropping 54 points on the Knicks, 33 produced off of three-point shots. This game, and the subsequent success of the Warriors, is credited with starting a seismic shift in the NBA's playing style, with teams reducing physical play around the basket and mid-range shots to take more three-pointers.

Ice hockey

• In 1959, Montreal Canadiens goalie Jacques Plante put on his goalie mask for the first time in regular play. This was when the personal safety of the players started to be taken more seriously. Afterwards, the NHL saw the rise of new equipment like mandatory helmets and face visors, and cracking down on violence like head shots and fighting.
• Bobby Orr popularized the concept of defensemen supporting offensive plays. After his retirement, he was also one of the leading voices calling for the reform of the NHL's corrupt pension system in The '90s, especially after he was defrauded and left almost bankrupt by his agent.
• Wayne Gretzky's 1988 trade to the Los Angeles Kings ignited the NHL's interest in expanding into the Sun Belt. At the time, the Kings were the only NHL team in the Sun Belt out of 21 franchises; as of 2021 there are ten^note Anaheim Ducks, Arizona Coyotes, Carolina Hurricanes, Dallas Stars, Florida Panthers, LA Kings, Nashville Predators, San Jose Sharks, Tampa Bay Lightning, Vegas Golden Knights out of 32.
• The New York Rangers' 1994 Stanley Cup win (their first in over 50 years at the time) led to a major explosion in popularity for the NHL in the United States.
• Patrick Roy is credited for popularizing the butterfly goaltending style, which eventually became the standard.
• Wayne Gretzky pioneered the use of the behind-the-net goal setup.
• The end of the 2004-05 lockout and subsequent salary cap changed the way teams recruited in a way similar to baseball's moneyball. Now, games were more competitive, higher scoring, faster, and dynasties were rarer. While the Blackhawks had a run in The New '10s, they faded fast and still allowed competition with other teams. The end of the lockout also coincided with two crucial rule changes that helped open up the game:
  • Goaltenders were barred from playing the puck behind the net, except within a newly created trapezoidal area with the net at its center. This was a response to goaltenders with strong puck-handling abilities, most notably Martin Brodeur, often being able to clear the puck before attacking players could arrive to contest possession.
  • An even more important change involved the offside rule. Previously, any pass that crossed any two of the three lines between the two goals (the blue lines that mark the attacking zones, and the red line at the center of the rink) resulted in an offside call and an automatic stoppage of play. The NHL ruled that the red line would no longer be used to determine an offside pass, forcing defenses to cover passes over a much larger area.
• The 2010 death of former Detroit Red Wings "enforcer" Bob Probert started a still-running conversation on the effects of fighting in ice hockey, such as substance abuse and head trauma.

Motor racing

• The 1955 Le Mans disaster, an explosive wreck at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in which 84 people died when a racecar went flying into the stands, forced professional motorsport bodies to start taking safety seriously, not least of all because many nations across Europe threatened to ban auto racing entirely^note Switzerland did ban most motor racing due to the crash—specifically, racing that involved direct on-course competition between vehicles. (Races against the clock, such as hillclimbs and rallies, were not banned.) That ban remained in effect until 2022, though an exemption was made for electric cars and Formula E has held races there unless they could guarantee that another, similar disaster wouldn't happen again. Pit lanes were redesigned to make it easier to slow down for them, spectator terraces were moved back from the track with a wide ditch separating them, and safety devices for reducing the impact of crashes were designed, most notably "Fitch barrels" filled with sand (named for John Fitch, an American driver at the 1955 Le Mans who watched the crash unfold, which caused him to retire from racing and become a safety advocate).
• Jim Hall's Chaparral Cars revolutionized auto racing and vehicular aerodynamics in The '60s. The Chaparral 2E Can-Am racer, debuting in 1966, boasted a massive, adjustable rear spoiler that demonstrated just how great an impact downforce could have on a car's performance by allowing it to take corners at much higher speeds, and when problems with the tall spoiler both causing drag and breaking off came up, Hall designed the 2J in 1970 around ground effects. While its particular solution — a massive internal fan that sucked the car to the ground — was quickly banned by all motorsport governing bodies (not to mention unreliable), the basic idea of building high-performance cars around using aerodynamics to keep them glued to the road stuck, and has informed their design ever since.
• The impact of the 1973–74 oil crisis left a deep mark on automobiles in general, one that naturally extended to motorsport. In the US, it killed the Can-Am series, the main form of road course racing in the US, as automakers became a lot less enthusiastic about supporting a series known for gas-guzzling supercars with few restrictions in a time when viewers were waiting in long lines to purchase gasoline for their own vehicles. Other racing series had to take a number of measures to reduce fuel consumption; the 12 Hours of Sebring and 24 Hours of Daytona were canceled that year, while NASCAR mandated that engines be no bigger than 358 cubic inches (a rule that's still in place today) and cut race lengths by 10%.
• NASCAR:
  • In 1970, the U.S. passed a law banning cigarette advertising on television, which took effect on January 2, 1971. With tobacco companies now barred from what had been their major promotional medium, they turned to sponsorships as a way around the new ban. R. J. Reynolds, which NASCAR had been courting as a sponsor for several years, was signed on as the new sponsor of NASCAR's top level via RJR's Winston brand starting with the 1971 season. The series became the Winston Cup Series, remaining so through 2003. This infusion of money into the circuit led to increasing professionalism, and set the stage for even bigger changes a year later...
  • ...when NASCAR set a minimum distance of 250 miles (about 400 km) for points-paying Cup Series races,^note It was shortened to 300 km for 1974, at the peak of the oil crisis, but returned to 250 miles in 1975. and mandated that all Cup Series races be held on a paved surface.^note From 2021 to 2023 NASCAR ran dirt races at Bristol Motor Speedway, laying a temporary dirt surface over the concrete racetrack. Due to the expense of doing this and fan outcry over losing one of the normal Bristol races the dirt race won't be run in 2024 and beyond, as this video explains there probably won't be another Cup Series race on dirt unless someone builds a dirt tack big enough to hold a Cup Series crowd, as the largest one currently existing in the U.S. has a capacity of only 25,000 people. This reduced the season schedule from 48 races to 31, with the eliminated races being as short as 50 miles. NASCAR considers the 1972 season to be the first of its "modern era".
  • The 1979 Daytona 500 had an impact on NASCAR broadly similar to that of the NFL's "Greatest Game Ever Played". The first 500-mile race to be broadcast live from beginning to end across the US (the Indianapolis 500 usually aired on a tape delay and was edited for television) happened just as a massive blizzard was ravaging the Northeast and locking millions of people in their homes with nothing to do but watch TV, and what they got was a race full of intrigue, upsets, a final-lap crash involving the two race leaders that opened the door for a Richard Petty win, and the drivers who crashed out fighting in the infield after the race. The spectacular ratings of over 15 million viewers (unmatched until 2001) set the stage for NASCAR to expand beyond its Southern base and become America's de facto national motorsport, especially after the collapse of the Can-Am series in the mid-'70s. What's more, the 1979 Daytona 500 also pioneered a number of innovations in motorsport broadcasting, most notably the "in-car" camera that allows viewers to see the race from the drivers' perspectives, as well as the low-angle speed shot.
  • Dale Earnhardt's fatal wreck at the 2001 Daytona 500 shook NASCAR to the core as badly as the 1955 Le Mans disaster did European motorsport and the fatal crash of Ayrton Senna in 1994 did Formula One, producing a major focus on safety in the years afterward. HANS (head-and-neck support) devices and six-point seat belts quickly became the standard, even before they were officially mandated, after the investigation found that Earnhardt's death was caused by the lack of a HANS device combined with an improperly-installed seat belt, while airplane-style black boxes were installed in every vehicle to record crash data in the event of a fatal accident (although there haven't been any since Earnhardt's death, thanks to the other aforementioned safety improvements). Less positively, Earnhardt's death also led to the introduction in 2007 of the much-maligned "Car of Tomorrow", an official NASCAR racing vehicle that was designed with safety in mind but turned out to have its own problems in that department (especially its large rear wing making cars more likely to flip in a crash), on top of the hate it received from fans and drivers alike who criticized its handling and performance. When it was replaced with the "Gen 6" car in 2013, there was much rejoicing.
• Formula One:
  • When F1 first began, all the cars had the engine at the front. Then Cooper won multiple races in 1958 with a revolutionary mid-engine car with much better weight distribution, and by 1962 every car on the grid was mid-engined. That year saw another Genre Turning Point with the introduction of the Lotus 25, whose lightweight, rigid monocoque construction and reclined driving position, coupled with the Cooper mid-engine design, set the template for every open-wheel racing car ever since.
  • 1968 saw no less than three Genre Turning Points. First, there was Chaparral's innovations in aerodynamics reaching the sport with the introduction of aerofoils and, by extension, the concept of downforce, which greatly boosted cornering speeds and triggered an aerodynamic arms race that continues to this day. Second was the introduction of sponsors (and sponsor liveries) through Gold Leaf's sponsorship of Lotus, which ultimately turned F1 into the multi-billion-dollar industry it is today. Finally, there was the death of Jim Clark in a Formula Two race, which shook the sport out of its mindset of "death is an acceptable risk" and began the push for ever-greater safety improvements that has drastically reduced (but sadly, not eliminated) the number of deaths not just in Formula One, but in single-seater racing as a whole.
  • The introduction of turbocharging in 1977 eventually proved to be this, once Renault managed to work out the kinks. By the early 1980s, if you didn't have a turbocharged engine, you'd be lucky to even score points, let alone win races. Between 1987 and 1989, turbos were gradually phased out in order to make the cars cheaper and slower, which proved to be another Genre Turning Point as it triggered a mass influx of new teams enticed by the reduced costs. This went on for several years before costs began to spiral again and the FIA tightened up the entry requirements to stop joke teams like Life and Andrea Moda getting onto the grid.

Other

• In Australian Rules Football, the 1970 VFL Grand Final is often seen as the point at which a major shift in the game occurred. Carlton, 44 points down at half time, came back to defeat Collingwood after a rousing half-time speech by coach Ron Barassi in which he exhorted the players to handball - and ever since then, the handball has been a much more prominent feature of the game, sometimes more common in a match than kicking the ball.
• The high jump was revolutionized by Dick Fosbury in 1968. It's weird to watch someone do a Fosbury Flop (it involves turning around at the point of the jump and going backwards over the bar), but it manages to allow jumpers to jump as much as 25% higher than they would be able to jumping straight forwards over the bar.^note The biomechanics behind the Flop approach Mind Screw levels. The jumper's center of gravity actually passes under the bar even while he or she is successfully clearing it. If you watch carefully, you'll notice that the jumper's back is quite noticeably bent at the jump's apex. Watch this for a more complete explanation.
• In Mixed Martial Arts:
  • The 2005 fight between Forrest Griffin and Stephen Bonnar on the undercard of the finale of The Ultimate Fighter, the first ever live-televised MMA event. Their legendary, back-and-forth brawl over a UFC contract made instant fans almost overnight, and it's been documented that ratings spiked during the fight as fans were frantically calling other people to point them to this fight. UFC president Dana White credits this fight as perhaps the most landmark moment in MMA history, and the turning point that launched it to such great, mainstream heights.
  • Gina Carano and Ronda Rousey transformed the reputation of women's fighting. Before their rise to fame, it was often stereotyped as "foxy boxing" and a sideshow by anybody who didn't actively follow it, while after, it was seen as on par with men's fighting and just as capable of drawing big crowds and delivering intense action.
• For cricket, Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket, launched in 1977, introduced colored team uniforms, day/night matches, and player payments high enough that being a professional cricketer was a viable career option.
• Rugby went through a number of these.
  • The biggest of them was the split of the Northern Rugby Football Union (which would go on to become Rugby League) from the Rugby Football Union in 1895.
  • The advent of professionalism in rugby union in 1995 opened up the sport a lot and brought about many changes, including the players being bigger, stronger and faster, such that in subsequent years laws had to be implemented to restrict what they were allowed to do for the sake of safety (not that the sport was one of the safest even before that).
  • The last major event of rugby union's amateur era was the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which took place shortly before the sport officially went professional in August of that year. (Outside the rugby universe, the final is probably best remembered as the climactic event of the 2009 movie Invictus.) That tournament, and especially New Zealand's semifinal win over England, saw the emergence of then-20-year-old All Blacks winger Jonah Lomu into global superstardom. Traditionally, wingers were mostly small, fast and agile. Lomu was fast and agile... but was anything but small, being 6'5" and around 250 lb (1.96 m, 115 kg), making him a huge battering ram nearly impossible to tackle. One moment in particular stands out as this trope: With 4 minutes gone in said semifinal, Lomu got the ball 30 meters out on the All Blacks' left side. After brushing off two attempted tackles, all that stood between him and the try line was Mike Catt. Lomu proceeded to run straight over him and stumbled into the goal area to score the first of his four tries that day.^note When Lomu died prematurely in 2015, Catt said he could still hear Lomu's footsteps in his head. Small wingers are now the exception rather than the norm.^note Taking this trend up to eleven: One winger of The New '10s, Fiji's Nemani Nadolo, has been listed at close to 300 pounds.
• The Z-Boys, a crew of surfers and skateboarders gathered around the Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions surf shop, did this for skateboarding in The '70s. Drawing on styles and techniques they'd learned as surfers, they invented most of the ground and sliding tricks that have become part of every pro skater's roster of moves, and caused the upright, freestyle skating styles of The '60s to mostly die out at the professional level in favor of their lower, flashier, and more aggressive style. They also took advantage of a major drought the gripped Southern California around that time to skate in drained swimming pools, where they invented aerial tricks once they realized that, with enough momentum, they could clear the lip of the pool. Most of the bowls and half-pipes seen in skateparks today are based on the principles that the Z-Boys used to skate in round-bottom swimming pools.
• This happened twice in rapid succession with Roller Derby in the early '00s.
  • First, Bad Girl Good Woman Productions left a major mark on the sport's public image when they revived it in 2002. Before, roller derby before had been known as a gender-neutral sport, but BGGW, born from the Austin music scene as the first all-female roller-derby organization, gave it a distinctly punkish Riot Grrrl aesthetic that made it known as not just a women's sport but a decidedly feminist one. Most notably, this led to the tradition of skaters taking "derby names", as one competitor who had been a survivor of Domestic Abuse did so as a way of claiming a new, tough image for herself, causing all of her teammates to do the same out of solidarity.
  • Second, when BGGW split in 2003 over the use of flat versus curved tracks, its largest successor, the Texas Rollergirls, pioneered the use of flat tracks that made the sport far more accessible. Before, roller derby had been played on banked tracks that were expensive to install and maintain, but with a flat track, it could be played at any roller rink with few modifications. Not only did this massively reduce the barrier to entry and cause the sport to explode in popularity in the early 21st century, it also led to a revival of roller skating during that time after it had seemingly been displaced by the rise of rollerblading (or inline skating) in the late '80s. To this day, the rulebook and track design of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association is based upon that which the Rollergirls (one of the organization's founding members) came up with.
• Cheerleading:
  • The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders did this for cheerleading in The '70s. Before, cheer routines, especially in high school and college, were focused primarily on acrobatics, but "America's Sweethearts" put a greater focus on dance and sex appeal (particularly their iconic hot pants and crop tops) that's widely credited with the popular image of cheerleaders as sex symbols. While cheerleading has long been a staple of American sports, the DCCs made it into an attraction in its own right as opposed to a sideshow. To this day, DCC is considered one of the premier dance teams in the country, on a par with companies like the Rockettes.
  • And in turn, the 2000 film Bring It On shifted it back to a focus on athletics, especially at the high school and college levels. In the '80s and '90s, cheerleading was seen less as a sport than as a fanservice affair, and its participants as either sexy airheads or catty brats rather than athletes. Bring It On, while a comedy, treated cheerleading as Serious Business and presented itself as a genuine sports movie, and devoted its opening sequence to mocking the aforementioned attitudes. Not only did attitudes towards cheerleading and fiction about it increasingly recognize it as a competitive sport and a highly athletic, physical, and even dangerous endeavor, but cheerleading itself also changed during that time, with acrobatics returning to the forefront and cheer routines getting far more elaborate than before.
• The launch of FanDuel in 2009 marked the end of the American professional leagues' long-fought effort to keep gambling out of sports. Ever since the Black Sox scandal in 1919, the leagues saw gambling as a threat to the integrity of sports that risked discrediting them if they were associated with it, and in the days when legal gambling was limited to just Las Vegas (and, later, Atlantic City and Native American casinos), enforcing this taboo was as simple as refusing to put any teams in Vegas and punishing any players, coaches, and teams who got in bed with the gambling industry. The internet, however, broke down that firewall. Even before the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in Murphy v. NCAA that overturned federal prohibitions on sports betting in the US outside a few states,^note The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which Murphy v. NCAA overturned, exempted Nevada and the sports lotteries conducted in Delaware, Montana, and Oregon due to the Grandfather Clause. With PASPA declared unconstitutional, as of September 2023 37 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting. FanDuel and other sites like it, most notably its main competitor DraftKings (launched in 2012), used a legal loophole surrounding Fantasy Sports to offer what was effectively sports betting by another name, all of it completely legal. As the leagues' efforts to maintain prohibitions on gambling turned increasingly futile as state after state legalized it, casinos and sportsbooks went from the pariahs of the American sports world to purchasing stadium naming rights and partnering with teams, leagues, and the sports press. The impact of this has been deeply controversial. While gambling has brought new revenue to the sports industry, a number of vocal critics argue that this partnership has also brought the social ills of gambling into the mainstream, on top of allegations that players and coaches are once again throwing games to cash in on bets, or even that entire leagues operate under kayfabe.

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