Why the league risks repeating college basketball’s slam dunk ban mistake

This is far from being an implausible logic. But the NRL stands at a crossroads here that may seem strangely familiar to a certain kind of American college sports fan.

As league officials consider radical changes to kickoff, they are treading where college basketball officials once stood; They decide, in their infinite collective wisdom, that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is too good at dunking the ball off the basket and should be prevented from doing so.

Let that stay with you. U.S. college basketball players during the decade from the late 1960s banned from the dunk.

Changing rugby league’s kick-off rules would serve to overturn a 119-year-old tradition. Allowing teams that have just lost points to choose whether to take the kickoff or take the kickoff to restart play is the kind of innovation that could be reasonably attractive in a meeting room; the kind of tweak that promises to add strategic depth and excitement to a world saturated with entertainment.

If the 17 clubs unite fiercely against the idea, they could sign a binding death pact of sorts. Never Choosing to take the ball after conceding a point. As if this would ever happen…

The parallels between rugby league in 2026 and US college basketball in the 1960s seem absurd at first glance. First of all, what does the antipodean collision sport and initiation protocol have to do with banning a basketball technique just because a player deigned to perfect it?

Both cases illuminate the dangerous calculations faced by sports administrators who consider rewriting the basic grammar of the sport they serve as guardians of.

From 1967 to 1976, the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the United States enacted one of the most controversial and transparently discriminatory rules in sports history: the ban on dunking basketballs during games.

The published justification cited preventing injuries and damage to equipment. The unofficial reason was simpler: The NCAA wanted to prevent one player’s unstoppable shooting from making a mockery of opposing teams’ defensive strategies and game results in the process.

The player the NCAA wanted to block was Lew Alcindor; he would later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. When he retired in the late 1980s, the same player held the NBA record for most points and games played.

He dominated college basketball at UCLA with his powerful dunks and overwhelming physical presence, leading the UCLA Bruins to three consecutive National Championships from 1967-69.

After the 1967 NCAA Championships and after Alcindor wore his first championship ring, the NCAA’s rules committee, clearly disturbed by Alcindor’s physical dominance and penchant for the dunk, began to level the playing field by removing his greatest weapon from his repertoire.

In a way, this is the antithesis of the NRL wanting to change the kick-off rules because it wants to create more razzmatazz. But it’s still the same reason, because the NRL wants to quell dominance.

The NCAA’s “dunk ban” backfired. Extraordinary. Rather than diminishing Alcindor’s impact and physical dominance, the ban forced him to develop his signature aerial hook, a nearly unblockable scoring shot that evolved into arguably the most devastating offensive weapon in professional basketball history.

The dunk ban deprived fans of basketball’s most exciting game and disrupted the development of the game.

Fairly or unfairly, the ban was perceived by many, especially the African-American community, as an attempt by the NCAA to stifle the increasingly athletic, above-the-rim style that was being added to the sport.

The rule had racial overtones that the NCAA could never adequately explain.

When the ban was finally lifted in 1976, the dunk returned with a vengeance and became the essence of basketball’s identity and marketing appeal.

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Imagine if Michael Jordan could never dunk at the University of North Carolina.

The NCAA’s attempt to legislate against athletic prowess stands as a cautionary tale about rule changes motivated by fear of change rather than genuine athletic concerns. This certainly remains one of the saddest decisions in college sports history; a myopic solution in search of a problem that never actually existed.

The fabric of a sport is an important necessity. It should not be mixed randomly.

Successful rule changes target discrete problems with surgical precision, while unsuccessful changes seek to fundamentally alter the competitive balance or strategic incentives in ways that produce cascading, unintended consequences.