[ocrp1982]

If I remember correctly a football game has 60 regulation minutes. Therefore, playing the game to the best of your ability for 60 minutes seems to me to be the only way to play the game.
In baseball it is not uncommon for a team to win by say, 13-1. No one ever to my knowledge has ever criticized the team with 13 runs as running up the score on the team with 1 run.
In hockey a team will continue to try to score even with mere minutes remaining even when they are up by several goals and it is impossible for the other team to ever hope to catch them. This is never an issue in hockey.
Why does this seem to come up fairly often in reference to football?

[krogers58]

In hockey a team will continue to try to score even with mere minutes remaining even when they are up by several goals and it is impossible for the other team to ever hope to catch them. This is never an issue in hockey.

Hockey has a whole series of unwritten rules to deal with these situations. Once the game is no longer in doubt, usually a 4 goal differential, unless it's early in the game, all serious hitting stops. Generally, depending on your coach, paybacks are appropriate when you are ahead. This means repayment for various cheap shots taken against players who have taken cheap shots at the winning team's players, where, due to discipline, they were not allowed to retaliate at the time. Players who play balls to the wall, when ahead, are cut loose by the coach and the enforcers for his team, and are allowed to bear the full brunt of the opposing teams anger. Nobody drives the net when the game is no longer in doubt, for either team. As these rules are unwritten, they are subject to change at any given moment.