If you could Breakaway all over again...

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

I agree with this as well. I think they did not want to see teams that could completely dominate a ball and power it up into the goal. They wanted the ball to be vulnerable at all times. The rules did the best they could to ensure teams never really had COMPLETE control over a ball, but the best teams still figured out how to do it (ie: 254, 148, 217, 1114). What it meant for the lower end teams was that they could hardly interact with the game piece in a way they wished to. A lot of it was bumping and praying you timed it right.

I'm a little confused why the apparent intent was for no one to have such ball control. Not being able to really take hold of a game piece just makes the game sloppier. It's implementing a task that "is hard and looks easy" and would only make the game less watchable than if it were a touch easier to control the ball.

The game didn't play out that way and I think that was a lot better as a result thanks to the IFI magnets, but I wonder if the game would be a lot worse with just random shop vacs versus backspin rollers.