NRL coaches will never fail to find loopholes that exist in the rule book.
They have been doing it for ever and a day, and another one has crept into the sport this weekend.
The NRL's shot clock, which was brought in a number of years ago for scrums and drop outs to minimise time wastage within the sport has proved, for the most part, a raving success.
Faster game equals more ball in play and a team not being able to take the mickey when it suits them, walking to a scrum or refusing to complete a drop out.
But it's also a well-known fact that teams do not want to defend a scrum close to their line. Scrum plays may be something of a dying breed in the NRL, but they are still dangerous when an attacking team is able to execute against limited defenders.
We have seen it in some big matches over the years - that Cronulla Sharks play in the 2016 grand final stands out as an example, even though that was more or less back over the top of the scrum rather than using space on the wings.
The bottom line is, for a defensive team, especially as the game gets faster and faster, the idea of defending a scrum against being able to reset your line and defend the tryline that way - if it's an option, it's a no-brainer.
And so it has apparently dawned on both Cameron Ciraldo and Todd Payten this weekend.
Because in their games - respectively the Good Friday clash for the Bulldogs against the Rabbitohs and the Saturday afternoon shellacking of the Dragons at Kogarah - both teams employed a tactic where they stood around, waited for the shot clock to expire and gave away an intentional penalty.
It's the definition of a professional foul, and yet, under the current NRL rules, it's not viewed as one.
So the defending team doesn't get sin binned, they get to reset their line, and momentum for the attacking team is bombed back to a regular set, with no option to re-pack the scrums.
Just to scratch the head a little bit further around the current set of rules, letting the shot clock expire if the scrum is repacked is a professional foul.
But teams currently don't have the option to repack the scrum if the original penalty was for a shot clock violation.
So once you've wrapped your head around that, the clear change that is needed is that an intentional non packing of the scrum - the blatant one where seven blokes stand around and watch the countdown clock on the big screen tick to zero - needs to become a professional foul.
That or attacking teams need to be given the right to simply repack the scrum.
There are two ways the NRL can play it, and maybe an immediate sin bin creates something of an unclear imbalance in the rules - what if a team genuinely tries to pack the scrum, but can't get there for whatever reason?
It shouldn't happen in close quarters to the tryline in all fairness unless a big break has been made the previous play, but it could.
So maybe they won't go that way, but the NRL certainly have two options to play this with, and they need to do it immediately.
Not at the end of the season. Not as an end of season trial in games that don't matter.
Right now, with teams having the tactic taken out of the basket of tricks by the start of Round 6.
