re: How do some people go their whole lives watching football and not learning the rules?

Casual fans of sports don't bother me, not sure why they should. I follow F1 pretty closely and we go with a group of friends to at least 2 each year. Some are casual fans that like the party, some like me are lifelong fans that follow pretty closely and some can literally cite chapter and verse from both the sporting and technical regulations. We all have a great time and are comfortable with our technical understanding of the rules, or we would change it.

As for PI keeping up with what is and isn't PI in multiple levels of the sport over to the last decade is damn near like work.

What bugs me is people that argue over the rules but don't know them and often are sitting at a computer and could look them up. The Memphis/State punt return for a touchdown yesterday is an example. It is really simple what the refs got right and wrong but tons of State fans were arguing the ball should not have been live. The ball was never properly downed, period. There were errors on the play by the refs but the biggest errors were on the State special teams.